Paint Shop 8 Review

Mr. Pickles said:

Here is a review I got, written by Chris Pirillo, who used to be on
TechTV and is Mr. Gnomedex......

Paint Shop Pro 8.0 is out - although I'm extremely reluctant to
give it a passing grade. It's power is undeniably magnificent, but
the UI is unbelievably gross. To give you any idea what kind of dog
this is, when you launch the app on a P4 3.0 GHz machine, you can
watch the toolbars redraw themselves. The horribly-emulated
XP-styled menus are just as bad, and every bit as useless.

Customization dialogs? They're all over the map, as if they were
designed by beauty school dropouts. Someone seriously needs to go
back to the drawing board; I'd expect this kind of experience from
v1.0, not eight.

Herein lies the Catch 22: I've yet to find a more feature-rich
image editor, and I can't see myself rolling back to a previous
version.

Give the background eraser tool a shot and you'll see what I mean;
it's never been easier to isolate foreground objects. The scripting
tool is another wonderful add-on that's been long overdue; I can't
wait to see more scripts surface on fan sites.

Would I recommend it to my parents? No. Would I recommend it to
graphics fanatics? Probably, but only if they're not already sold
on a Photoshop product.

Your tolerance for inconsistency and haphazard implementation may
be lower than mine.

--
Mr. Pickles

Click to expand...

Stephen Houdek said:

I like the program, I don't like the load time. It is nearly 10
times slower than the previous version and needs to be changed.
That alone will turn a lot of folks off on the product as far as I
can tell.....He's nailed the sluggishness to a tee.......

Click to expand...

John Bradbury said:

Stephen Houdek said:

I like the program, I don't like the load time. It is nearly 10
times slower than the previous version and needs to be changed.
That alone will turn a lot of folks off on the product as far as I
can tell.....He's nailed the sluggishness to a tee.......

Click to expand...

I've been testing the PPP8 over the last couple of weeks and while
it has a lot of nice features compared to PS 5.5 it is very slow a
typical "autolevels" will take about 20 x longer than PS.
So decision made, I'll spend the extra bucks and upgrade tp PS7
John Bradbury

Click to expand...

Richard in FL said:

It is actually is a rewrite from the ground up, so it really is a
version 1.0, that is why it took them 2 years to release it.

Nice features, but slow.

Richard

Click to expand...

Mr. Pickles said:

Here is a review I got, written by Chris Pirillo, who used to be on
TechTV and is Mr. Gnomedex......

Paint Shop Pro 8.0 is out - although I'm extremely reluctant to
give it a passing grade. It's power is undeniably magnificent, but
the UI is unbelievably gross. To give you any idea what kind of dog
this is, when you launch the app on a P4 3.0 GHz machine, you can
watch the toolbars redraw themselves. The horribly-emulated
XP-styled menus are just as bad, and every bit as useless.

Customization dialogs? They're all over the map, as if they were
designed by beauty school dropouts. Someone seriously needs to go
back to the drawing board; I'd expect this kind of experience from
v1.0, not eight.

Herein lies the Catch 22: I've yet to find a more feature-rich
image editor, and I can't see myself rolling back to a previous
version.

Give the background eraser tool a shot and you'll see what I mean;
it's never been easier to isolate foreground objects. The scripting
tool is another wonderful add-on that's been long overdue; I can't
wait to see more scripts surface on fan sites.

Would I recommend it to my parents? No. Would I recommend it to
graphics fanatics? Probably, but only if they're not already sold
on a Photoshop product.

Your tolerance for inconsistency and haphazard implementation may
be lower than mine.

--
Mr. Pickles

Click to expand...

Mr. Pickles said:

Here is a review I got, written by Chris Pirillo, who used to be on
TechTV and is Mr. Gnomedex......

Paint Shop Pro 8.0 is out - although I'm extremely reluctant to
give it a passing grade. It's power is undeniably magnificent, but
the UI is unbelievably gross. To give you any idea what kind of dog
this is, when you launch the app on a P4 3.0 GHz machine, you can
watch the toolbars redraw themselves. The horribly-emulated
XP-styled menus are just as bad, and every bit as useless.

Customization dialogs? They're all over the map, as if they were
designed by beauty school dropouts. Someone seriously needs to go
back to the drawing board; I'd expect this kind of experience from
v1.0, not eight.

Herein lies the Catch 22: I've yet to find a more feature-rich
image editor, and I can't see myself rolling back to a previous
version.

Give the background eraser tool a shot and you'll see what I mean;
it's never been easier to isolate foreground objects. The scripting
tool is another wonderful add-on that's been long overdue; I can't
wait to see more scripts surface on fan sites.

Would I recommend it to my parents? No. Would I recommend it to
graphics fanatics? Probably, but only if they're not already sold
on a Photoshop product.

Your tolerance for inconsistency and haphazard implementation may
be lower than mine.

--
Mr. Pickles

Click to expand...

Noel Eiffe said:

But I have to say, sicking it on a random sample of misc images I
would say that 80% of the time it's made good choices across the
whole spectrum of color balancing, sharpening, contrast,
saturation, etc.

I'd say it's a robot, but perhaps the smartest robot I've seen yet...

Noel

Richard in FL said:

It is actually is a rewrite from the ground up, so it really is a
version 1.0, that is why it took them 2 years to release it.

Nice features, but slow.

Richard

Click to expand...

Click to expand...