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 vector editing capabilities, in the same document. You could create raster layers, and do traditional drawing and filtering, and you could also create vector layers, where you could draw shapes and paths which would remain editable and would be rasterised on the fly.
It took a while to get your head around this capability, but once you did, it was incredibly powerful, especially for the time period we're talking about. Coupled with the rate at which its general raster editing capabilities were improving, I suspect Corel feared not just that PSP was becoming a more serious competitor in the raster space, but that it would undermine the market for CorelDraw, and threaten the whole model of selling separate vector and raster editors.
In the past few years, mixed paradigm vector/raster editors like Sketch have become more common. But download a copy of PSP 8 and you'll see that Jasc got there years before the rest of the industry, to such an extent it meant PSP had to be killed.
Funny enough, at first I thought that the article was about that, although the name didn't seem quite right, and obviously the years and outcome were wrong.
I wonder if that's the reason that Corel acquired Xara back in the nineties?
I discovered the program around 1995, after Corel acquired them. I figured it would be a 'cheap' version of Corel Draw. Instead, it was quite a bit better! Particularly for the time, there was nothing faster that I was aware of. (In 1995 memory was prohibitively expensive, and Xara was very efficient.)
I still use it to this day, though the software reverted back to it's original owner long ago.
> it would undermine the market for CorelDraw, and threaten the whole model of selling separate vector and raster editors.
PSP is only potentially a replacement for PhotoPaint, which was always bundled with Draw. It would never be a threat to their other raster tools like Painter. Nor would Draw be threatened by a tool with vectors grafted on. Corel just wanted to bring in a successful product for the entry level market.
Corel also notably let PhotoPaint wither on the vine even though it was vastly superior to the contemporaneous Photoshop version in its earlier incarnations. They just weren't willing to invest the dev resources to add more sophistication.
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.
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 documentation and every time I'd get a reply within 4-8 hours directly from Peter the founder of Persits. I didn't even need to supply a license number or proof of purchase, it was just straightforward good old fashioned support and customer service. What was also nice about them as well was that they never fleeced you for "upgrades", you bought a lifetime license and that was it.
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.).
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.
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 them with free professional juggernaut tools.
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.
You also had to be an expert in multiple levels of the technology stack to build any program with cross platform support. Yes, packages were smaller, but developers had to do way more work and so applications were released less frequently. It would be very hard back then to make a cross platform program as a weekend project.
Paint Shop Pro 5 (and later 6 & 7) is still to this day one of my favorite pieces of software (no, I'm not still using it) and one of the first things in the PC era that I didn't pirate.
It was largely responsible for my early development as a web designer and later developer. I still remember it being incredibly intuitive and fun to use. I probably logged thousands of hours inside of that application.
Paint Shop Pro (I think 6) was my first ever non-Paint graphics editing program. I spotted it at a dollar store in Alabama, soon after moving to the US and getting our first computer. At the time I wanted to become a web designer.
I fricking loved Paint Shop Pro. As a teenager I made some websites for local bands and record companies. I was at the stage where you'd create one fancy image and then slice it into website parts to position them as backgrounds on the page and layer the textual elements over them. Paint Shop Pro was a joy to me as the maker of these cheesy band website layouts that I'd then slice up.
I have a similar story about Brad Templeton's C64 Assembler. It was the first development tool I ever bought and, at the time, very expensive for me as a high school student. I later came to claim that I would always pay for any software that I used for more time than it would have taken me to earn the money to buy it. Quickly that became everything I used as my earnings were a lot better.
I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to thank Brad for C64 Assembler and the role it had in forming some of my ethics around fair-use and paying for intellectual property.
Ha, right, no upgrade needed in that version... but eventually I did upgrade and recommend it to others, due to the generosity of the honor system they put in place in that version. Loved the software. Wait, maybe that was Winzip. Both were great.
I was not as honest as the author of this article. I didn't buy Paint Shop Pro and I didn't write to its creator. I got a free trial on a cover-disk of some PC magazine and managed to extend the trial indefinitely via some hack or other.
Until then my only image editing tool was Microsoft Paint(brush), and PSP was a whole new world. Layers, clone tools, airbrushing. It was amazing. I was one of the few kids in my school who could edit images like that -- there were a couple who had Photoshop because their parents did design or photography.
Then at some point they clamped down on dodgy users, but by then Adobe had old versions of Photoshop out for free and eventually the GIMP made it to Windows.
> It was no surprise to me years later to learn that JASC was acquired by Corel. Your life’s hard work, honesty, and kindness rewarded you, and I couldn’t have been happier for you.
Rewarded maybe financially, but it must have been a bittersweet moment considering that PSP probably had already peaked at that point and definitely did not prosper under new ownership.
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.
I think the oft repeated complaint about GIMP UI is largely unfounded. To someone who uses GIMP as their first image editing/creating program its multiple floating windows is a good paradigm, esp if using a large wide aspect monitor. I would feel constrained now in operating in a single window, when compared to that.
The Wikipedia page about Jasc [0] does give some information about Robert Voit, which is written in present tense, indicating he is still alive. However, the page has not been updated for a while.
There's a benefit to starting out as an airline pilot.
Decision making is critical for a pilot, in the worst case hesitation can mean death. Robert Voit was a master at taking in relevant information, making a decision, and moving on. That's an essential skill for a good business leader.
I stopped upgrading at version 4.14, in 1997. I think version 5 added layers and some other complexities that I just didn't care to deal with.
Eventually, I added Gimp to my "arsenal" for occasional complex work, but that 20 year old Paintshop Pro is still my daily driver for quick graphics stuff. Runs fine on Windows 10.
Animation Shop, PSP's sibling application for creating animations, is something I still keep on a VM for making highly customized gifs - timing for frames, pixel modification, compression, etc.
Corel had made it available via Jasc's FTP server for free a number of years back when I went looking for it again.
I check every now and then, but I've never found anything nearly as useful. Other software seems to have a much reduced feature set, be extremely slow or unstable, and maddeningly, not offer any control over individual frames.
It's possible there's something in the Adobe suite, but I (alone, of seemingly everyone on the Internet) never pirated Photoshop, and wasn't willing to fork out the asking price.
My dad came home from work one day and handed me a floppy disk from one of his colleagues. I suddenly had my hands on my first decent image editor and my first digital image of a naked woman.
Paint Shop Pro 6 was far better than the version of Photoshop at the time IF you were a Web dev. While Photoshop did a better job of handling really big photos for print, PSP had the best tools for generating web-ready images.
Back then I was still going to school and thus didn't have much money. And so it was always a joy when a new version of psp came out so that I could us an evaluation copy for another 30 days :D
edit: the article states simple re-installation was enough to reset the evaluation? I thought I tried that. Maybe it changed with later versions?
[+] [-] stupidcar|7 years ago|reply
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 vector editing capabilities, in the same document. You could create raster layers, and do traditional drawing and filtering, and you could also create vector layers, where you could draw shapes and paths which would remain editable and would be rasterised on the fly.
It took a while to get your head around this capability, but once you did, it was incredibly powerful, especially for the time period we're talking about. Coupled with the rate at which its general raster editing capabilities were improving, I suspect Corel feared not just that PSP was becoming a more serious competitor in the raster space, but that it would undermine the market for CorelDraw, and threaten the whole model of selling separate vector and raster editors.
In the past few years, mixed paradigm vector/raster editors like Sketch have become more common. But download a copy of PSP 8 and you'll see that Jasc got there years before the rest of the industry, to such an extent it meant PSP had to be killed.
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|7 years ago|reply
Fireworks was also doing this around the same time but seems to have been completely been forgotten because of Photoshops dominance.
[+] [-] ableal|7 years ago|reply
Actually, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperPaint_(Macintosh) is where I first saw that (wiki says released 1986, sounds right.)
Funny enough, at first I thought that the article was about that, although the name didn't seem quite right, and obviously the years and outcome were wrong.
[+] [-] johnvanommen|7 years ago|reply
I discovered the program around 1995, after Corel acquired them. I figured it would be a 'cheap' version of Corel Draw. Instead, it was quite a bit better! Particularly for the time, there was nothing faster that I was aware of. (In 1995 memory was prohibitively expensive, and Xara was very efficient.)
I still use it to this day, though the software reverted back to it's original owner long ago.
[+] [-] cpach|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|7 years ago|reply
PSP is only potentially a replacement for PhotoPaint, which was always bundled with Draw. It would never be a threat to their other raster tools like Painter. Nor would Draw be threatened by a tool with vectors grafted on. Corel just wanted to bring in a successful product for the entry level market.
Corel also notably let PhotoPaint wither on the vine even though it was vastly superior to the contemporaneous Photoshop version in its earlier incarnations. They just weren't willing to invest the dev resources to add more sophistication.
[+] [-] zokier|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpindar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teh_klev|7 years ago|reply
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 documentation and every time I'd get a reply within 4-8 hours directly from Peter the founder of Persits. I didn't even need to supply a license number or proof of purchase, it was just straightforward good old fashioned support and customer service. What was also nice about them as well was that they never fleeced you for "upgrades", you bought a lifetime license and that was it.
[0]: http://www.persits.com/index.html
[+] [-] TimJYoung|7 years ago|reply
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.).
[+] [-] nailer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 51Cards|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|7 years ago|reply
Piratism hurts small low-cost hobbyist software most by dislocating them with free professional juggernaut tools.
[+] [-] Patrick_Devine|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|7 years ago|reply
"Piracy" is the usual word.
[+] [-] RodericDay|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chatmasta|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modzu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|7 years ago|reply
Most other paint programs all worked based on keyboard shortcuts (which weren't bad, they let you fly through the interface)
[+] [-] busterarm|7 years ago|reply
It was largely responsible for my early development as a web designer and later developer. I still remember it being incredibly intuitive and fun to use. I probably logged thousands of hours inside of that application.
[+] [-] and0|7 years ago|reply
I'd still take Photoshop over it, but it was a surprisingly solid alternative.
[+] [-] drakonka|7 years ago|reply
I fricking loved Paint Shop Pro. As a teenager I made some websites for local bands and record companies. I was at the stage where you'd create one fancy image and then slice it into website parts to position them as backgrounds on the page and layer the textual elements over them. Paint Shop Pro was a joy to me as the maker of these cheesy band website layouts that I'd then slice up.
[+] [-] bondolo|7 years ago|reply
I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to thank Brad for C64 Assembler and the role it had in forming some of my ethics around fair-use and paying for intellectual property.
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thetrumanshow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callumprentice|7 years ago|reply
TIL: JASC stood for Jets and Software Company..
Adding my name to the list of people who loved Paint Shop Pro and had several amazing interactions with the company.
[+] [-] pieterr|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/pages/old-brands/jasc/
[+] [-] ariehkovler|7 years ago|reply
I was not as honest as the author of this article. I didn't buy Paint Shop Pro and I didn't write to its creator. I got a free trial on a cover-disk of some PC magazine and managed to extend the trial indefinitely via some hack or other.
Until then my only image editing tool was Microsoft Paint(brush), and PSP was a whole new world. Layers, clone tools, airbrushing. It was amazing. I was one of the few kids in my school who could edit images like that -- there were a couple who had Photoshop because their parents did design or photography.
Then at some point they clamped down on dodgy users, but by then Adobe had old versions of Photoshop out for free and eventually the GIMP made it to Windows.
[+] [-] zokier|7 years ago|reply
Rewarded maybe financially, but it must have been a bittersweet moment considering that PSP probably had already peaked at that point and definitely did not prosper under new ownership.
[+] [-] DanielleMolloy|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] com2kid|7 years ago|reply
Once you learn how to do something in it, it makes sense as to why.
GIMP on the other hand, once I learned how to do something, I still hated it.
Then again GIMP makes simple things like pasting a major confusing pain.
[+] [-] billfruit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mynewtb|7 years ago|reply
Have you tried the new 2.10 and the single window mode?
[+] [-] CiPHPerCoder|7 years ago|reply
Did Robert Voit die, or was this prompted solely by the author's reminiscence?
[+] [-] throwawayxrvv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ian_lotinsky|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
I forgot about PSP. But Reading about it brings lots of memories. It was a great program, just like its author.
[+] [-] LeonM|7 years ago|reply
The Wikipedia page about Jasc [0] does give some information about Robert Voit, which is written in present tense, indicating he is still alive. However, the page has not been updated for a while.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasc_Software
[+] [-] erdosnew|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark-r|7 years ago|reply
Decision making is critical for a pilot, in the worst case hesitation can mean death. Robert Voit was a master at taking in relevant information, making a decision, and moving on. That's an essential skill for a good business leader.
[+] [-] patrickg_zill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbernard|7 years ago|reply
But for me, the best version ever was 3.0. I was able to draw pretty impressive diagrams at the pixel level, without any problem.
In subsequent versions, they modified the zoom tool, the GUI and the brushes, so it was quite harder to do the same thing.
[+] [-] kmeade|7 years ago|reply
Eventually, I added Gimp to my "arsenal" for occasional complex work, but that 20 year old Paintshop Pro is still my daily driver for quick graphics stuff. Runs fine on Windows 10.
Amazing piece of software and Minnesota!
[+] [-] duggan|7 years ago|reply
Corel had made it available via Jasc's FTP server for free a number of years back when I went looking for it again.
I check every now and then, but I've never found anything nearly as useful. Other software seems to have a much reduced feature set, be extremely slow or unstable, and maddeningly, not offer any control over individual frames.
It's possible there's something in the Adobe suite, but I (alone, of seemingly everyone on the Internet) never pirated Photoshop, and wasn't willing to fork out the asking price.
[+] [-] uberman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crtasm|7 years ago|reply
Never did find out if he knew about the latter.
[+] [-] Zaskoda|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cJ0th|7 years ago|reply
edit: the article states simple re-installation was enough to reset the evaluation? I thought I tried that. Maybe it changed with later versions?