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Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

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Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#21
PSP7 was a favorite piece of software that I had been using for years when still mainly on Windows systems. It was useful and intuitive when having to make changes to plenty of raster images, or when doing pixel graphics; creating alpha transparent sections, clean ups, and so on. I also used Paint.NET a lot for batch edits.

It still seems a bit difficult to find a replacement for these two on macOS and Linux. Intuitive interfaces focusing on primary image editing functions and stable output to various formats are probably what is missing for non-professional users like me.

GIMP seems like a great project but has a terrible overblown UI. I tried Photoshop / Illustrator for a year as you get the CS4-subscription at a low price from my university. A few features, e.g. how embedded images were handled are nice, but the software is massive and the interface is so weirdly complex that I had to search for guides for the simplest tasks (who is profiting from having to "study" CS4...?). With PSP7, which is decently powerful I went through a couple of tutorials and was set up for years. Also, I had spent half an hour to deactivate all the spyware that comes with CS4, this is a no-go.

You can read that I am just really ignorant about modern graphics editing workflows. I'm not a graphics professional, but need to make "production level" graphics every few months. I need relatively technical vector illustrations (e.g. of experiment flows, NN models) and clean figures of scientific results (raster) in a visualization-heavy field.

For vector graphics I now really like Inkscape with its SVG basis. I still go back to Dia a lot though whenever the illustration fits their limited (but sufficient) scope. Both can be used on Linux and macOS.

Still searching for a powerful but plain & simple (and stable!) raster graphics editor though. Currently Krita looks nice, but it is clearly in development stage. Would pay for either Acorn or Pixelmator if I wasn't concerned that they will also start emulating the UI of Photoshop in the future.

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#24
post #19

I still have my copy of PSP 7 (from circa 2001). It's still (for my rather modest needs) my go-to image editor to this day yet. Apropos nice letters and communications from founders of software companies such as JASC, the hosting company I worked for used many of Persits Software's[0] components on our Windows/IIS servers. Every now and again I'd need to clarify some technical thing with them that wasn't in their doc…

Man PSP 5 was fantastic. Learning photo manipulation on PSP, and comparing it to the slow, laggy, unintuitive mess that Photoshop seemed to be, I'm still not convinced that Adobe products actually work to this day. Obviously other people have better experiences with Adobe, but I also suspect they're more tolerant to slower UIs.

I had a (ahem, cough, shh) hooky copy of Photoshop back in the mid 2000's but always got frustrated with it and reverted back to PSP. PSP always made more sense to my non-graphics designer brain.

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#25

I still have my copy of PSP 7 (from circa 2001). It's still (for my rather modest needs) my go-to image editor to this day yet. Apropos nice letters and communications from founders of software companies such as JASC, the hosting company I worked for used many of Persits Software's[0] components on our Windows/IIS servers. Every now and again I'd need to clarify some technical thing with them that wasn't in their doc…

Thank you for saying this.

We conduct business in a similar way, as do (I suspect) most other very small software companies. It's one of the things that irks me the most when developers rail about proprietary software and use MS/Adobe/Oracle as the examples. There are a lot of good, small software companies out there that have been doing proprietary products for years, and they possess a lot of qualities that we all seem to value quite a bit (responsiveness, understanding, flexibility, loyalty, etc.).

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#26
post #16

While Paint Shop Pro 6 is the most beloved version, PSP 7 and (particularly) 8, took the software in a very interesting direction. I remain convinced that this directly lead to Corel acquiring it with the unstated but definite intention of crippling it. See, 6 and below were fairly traditional raster-based editors. But starting in 7, and with substantial improvements in 8, PSP introduced the concept of raster and vec…

Checking wikipedia PSP got vector tools in version 6, released in 1999. Photoshop got them also in version 6, released in 2000. So, yeah, PSP was pushing it early, but it didn't take that long for PS to get on the train too.

PS Raster was very limited for years after this.

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#27

I still have my copy of PSP 7 (from circa 2001). It's still (for my rather modest needs) my go-to image editor to this day yet. Apropos nice letters and communications from founders of software companies such as JASC, the hosting company I worked for used many of Persits Software's[0] components on our Windows/IIS servers. Every now and again I'd need to clarify some technical thing with them that wasn't in their doc…

I still use PSP 9.01 from 2004 for most of my basic editing needs... it's set as the default application for most graphics types.

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#28

While Paint Shop Pro 6 is the most beloved version, PSP 7 and (particularly) 8, took the software in a very interesting direction. I remain convinced that this directly lead to Corel acquiring it with the unstated but definite intention of crippling it. See, 6 and below were fairly traditional raster-based editors. But starting in 7, and with substantial improvements in 8, PSP introduced the concept of raster and vec…

> it was incredibly powerful, especially for the time period we're talking about

Fireworks was also doing this around the same time but seems to have been completely been forgotten because of Photoshops dominance.

Re: Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

#30
post #6

PSP was one of those programs (along with Winamp) that are the hallmarks of the golden age of user experience for me. They had a lot of functionality but were very lean, a joy to use and reasonably priced. I miss the days when you didn't need a 100 MB (relatively speaking) package just to show a screen.

Any DOS program that had a nice GUI blew my mind back then

Most other paint programs all worked based on keyboard shortcuts (which weren't bad, they let you fly through the interface)

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