So you found the graphic that is PERFECT for your web site - well, almost perfect. If you could just...

Unless you've (or the company you work for) laid out significant money for Photoshop, at this point you are pretty stuck. You can use the almost perfect picture, or you can keep looking.

Enter Paint Shop Pro. PSP is priced at about the same level as Photoshop LE (that stands for Limited Edition, which tries to make it sound rare and great, but LIMITED is the key word), but it provides the vast majority of the functionality of a full version of Photoshop. For most webmasters who do volunteer or personal work, the functionality of PSP is more than enough. Masks, filters, color adjustment, file type conversion, picture tubes, even an included but separate package for animated GIF generation.

I have been using Paint Shop Pro since version 5, and recently upgraded to version 7. The functionality improves slightly with each version, but not significantly enough to make reviews of one version inappropriate for making the choice for a different version. You may still be able to find v6 in some stores, but if you visit jasc.com, you will only find v7 now. Version 7 has some additional photo touchup features that v6 didn't have that could come in handy if you own a digital camera.

The one main problem with using Paint Shop Pro is the same as its main advantage - it isn't Adobe Photoshop. The vast majority of graphical designers use Photoshop, and seem to look down their noses at anyone who doesn't. To wit - notable web goddess Molly Holzschlag (www.molly.com), in her book Web By Design, specifically tells readers that though some people swear that Paint Shop Pro is exactly the same as Photoshop, they should still pay the money required to purchase Photoshop rather than use PSP. Similarly, it will be hard for you to find step-by-step tutorials showing a graphical design novice how to produce professional effects, though articles of that type abound about Photoshop. The online help in Paint Shop Pro originally left me very confused, because it threw out terms that I had no clue what meant. In version 6 and version 7 the help got a bit better, but still assumes you know what they are talking about. (Web By Design, BTW, is an excellent resource for figuring out what all those terms mean, even though in internet years it's an ancient book.)

That said, I use PSP mostly to touch up, convert, change the colors, and otherwise meddle with pre-existing pictures (you really wouldn't WANT to see something I attempted to create for myself, honest). For example, last weekend I used Paint Shop Pro to take an entire SanDisk CompactFlash (tm) disk full of WAY underexposed pictures of the high school musical and edit them to a point where you could actually see my kids in them. Another favorite trick is combining and editing clipart to create the exact effect I want for a web page or a publication. I have occasionally used filters and masks to enhance scanned or digital pictures for use on various web sites. Does it annoy the snot out of you that you can't rotate clip art in Microsoft Word? Paste it into PSP, rotate it the way you want it, and paste it back. You can even pick a few different small images and put them in a "picture tube" of your own generation, and then use them to create a fancy border for your site with minimal artistic talent required (a GOOD thing for me!).

Another handy feature that I really miss when I'm on a PC that doesn't have graphical editing software, though hardly a reason by itself to go run out and buy the program, is the ability to find the exact RGB value of that color you just LOVE, and have to have as the background/text color/link color for the site you are working on.

Overall, as long as you don't mind the "real" graphic designers - and those who think they are - looking down their noses slightly at you, Paint Shop Pro is a great tool for the webmaster on a tight budget.

Recommended: Yes