Graphical Production at Your Fingertips (Paint Shop Pro 7.0)

Member Name: darrenloud

Product:	Paint Shop Pro 7.0
Date:	22/08/01 (173 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Relatively cheap, easy-to-use, wide range of features.

Disadvantages: Has some advanced limitations.

PaintShop Pro 7 (PSP7) is a very popular piece of graphical production software. It is cited that 20 million people use this software, so one could say it must be good.

It has a diverse range of features, offering something for everyone, so to speak and retails for about £60.

For a private 'home' user, PSP7 will allow you to edit, retouch and revamp exisiting photographs. For an advanced user or web developer, this program will allow you to create and optimize web graphics with its built-in web tools.

The software comes bundled with Animation Shop 3, this allows the user to animate the graphics he or she may produced within PSP7, thus creating animated graphics suitable for use online.

As with many graphical production software, it has a very similar layout and functionality as with all the top brands. Adobe's Photoshop 6 and the freeware Serif PhotoPlus 4 all function in much the same way. With the usual drop-down menus at the top of the screen, with optional 'panels' onscreen that can be dragged to where you want them. It also has the grid-type layout, so that you can make sure you are creating graphics to the size you want them.

I have used this program for web graphic production. It has useful tools such as image slicing, image mapping and rollover-effect button creating too.

PSP7 allows you to import exisiting images and edit them and export your final pieces of work in to a wide range of different file extensions, including, but limited to, JPEG, GIF, PNG etc.

PSP7 has 75 built in 'special' effects that can be used on text and images and has various different 'tools' that make producing fancy text graphics or complex shape collages easily.

The last thing PSP7 has, which is worth mentioning, is it's web-compatibility. It enables you to email graphics straight from the program, in conjunction with your email client. It also has the facility to
upload graphics on to a website so you can share them with your friends and family.

All in all, this program is a great all-round graphical production software item. However, from the point of view of an advanced user, the likes of Adobe Photoshop 6 would probably be more up your street.

Summary: