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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

#81

Post by Drdrdrq »

mynewtb wrote: post #74
DanielleMolloy wrote: post #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. Intuiti…

> GIMP seems like a great project but has a terrible overblown UI Have you tried the new 2.10 and the single window mode?

I haven't, but I have another bone to pick with its authors. They lost credibility in my eyes with the whole Save/Export debacle. Sure, I use a plugin now that changes behaviour so I can save to PNG (who in the world uses xcf directly anyway?), but it's a pain to install everywhere, and I'm afraid it will stop working one day. I really wish they listened to their longtime users.

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

#82

Post by jentulman »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #28
stupidcar wrote: post #9

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.

It's still available if you dig around on Adobe's site.

Despite having the full creative suite I still turn to Fireworks for quick jobs sometimes when I need to do a fast crop or slice job, or put together a simple 'constructed' image element.

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

#83

Post by DanielleMolloy »

mynewtb wrote: post #74
DanielleMolloy wrote: post #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. Intuiti…

> GIMP seems like a great project but has a terrible overblown UI Have you tried the new 2.10 and the single window mode?

I have not, thanks for the pointer. GIMP is still a software I would like to like; will give it a try.

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

#85

Post by tquinn »

gfodor wrote: post #32
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yep, it still is puzzling why Fireworks never got the recognition it deserved -- the amount of unnecessary suffering UI designers went through for 10 years they could have avoided by just switching tools is mind boggling.

I absolutely loved Fireworks, and it was mind boggling to me why people were using Photoshop at the time which seemed painful for most UI work.

I've gone from Photoshop (1st version was 4.0 that I remember) -> Fireworks -> Sketch

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

#86

Post by ssharp »

gfodor wrote: post #32
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yep, it still is puzzling why Fireworks never got the recognition it deserved -- the amount of unnecessary suffering UI designers went through for 10 years they could have avoided by just switching tools is mind boggling.

I don't think it ever got enough recognition for handling UI designs and everyone just gravitated towards Photoshop or Illustrator.

I think its heyday was when HTML table layouts were still how you had to layout websites and it's slicing capabilities were really convenient. I suspect that was the killer feature for a lot of people but once CSS layouts took over, Fireworks really fell out of favor and Adobe never bothered to reposition it as a UI tool.

I still use it to this day for my limited editing/mockup needs. The new workflow seems to be mockup tool (like Balsamiq) -> Photoshop design -> HTML/CSS, but for my needs, I can get reasonably close enough in both layout and design in Fireworks just do Fireworks -> HTML/CSS.

I don't know if a tool that is close enough to Fireworks to be a good replacement has come around, but I know it's definitely not Photoshop, which I find far too complicated for the basic tasks I need.

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

#87

Post by chipotle_coyote »

derefr wrote: post #76
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. Fireworks was a raster-based graphics program that behaved like a vector program -- everything you drew was an object that could be moved backward and forward on its layer, with opacity, clipping, blending style, etc., set independently. There was no real distinction between vector shapes, text shapes, and raster shapes; all operations were available on any graphics object at any point in time.

The clearer way to describe it is that Fireworks was a reuse of the Macromedia Flash drawing engine. So you had shapes, and these shapes had z-axis positions, a stack of active filters, and a reference to a texture. A Fireworks PNG document, then, was a pile of shapes (just like a Flash animation frame), with each shape referred to as a "layer"; along with a pile of mutable texture data for the shapes to use, with ea…

I'd forgotten that sort of clever craziness with Fireworks PNG files! For a while after discovering the program I thought, "Wow, PNG does a whole lot of neat stuff I didn't think it could." Later I learned, no, Fireworks was just stuffing a whole lot of Fireworks-specific data into private chunks. :)

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

#88

Post by PeterMikhailov »

nailer wrote: post #19
teh_klev wrote: post #17

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.

All of the anti counterfeiting US currency code in PS probably slows it down.

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

#89

Post by Patrick_Devine »

zokier wrote: post #31

PSP is imho the prime example of how piratism hurts software industry. The problem was not so much that PSP was pirated, but that Photoshop was pirated. Most people did not need Photoshop, and would have been happy PSP users. But if Photoshop was "free" then it is natural that people gravitated towards the "industry-standard" "professional" tool. Piratism hurts small low-cost hobbyist software most by dislocating the…

What's your take on big companies contributing and/or running open source/free software? Doesn't that also dislocate small low-cost hobbyist software?

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

#90

Post by PhasmaFelis »

zokier wrote: post #31

PSP is imho the prime example of how piratism hurts software industry. The problem was not so much that PSP was pirated, but that Photoshop was pirated. Most people did not need Photoshop, and would have been happy PSP users. But if Photoshop was "free" then it is natural that people gravitated towards the "industry-standard" "professional" tool. Piratism hurts small low-cost hobbyist software most by dislocating the…

> piratism

"Piracy" is the usual word.

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