dacs.doc electric

Dilemma?? Do you spend $600 for the real thing, or $60 for "not exactly"? Really, no dilemma at all. For that difference we will take "anywhere near".

That's what our April General Meeting presented. Adobe Photoshop is the acknowledged King of the Hill in the graphics business. Every practicing professional has it. So it seems logical that if you can put out a product that comes anywhere near Photoshop and sell it for one-tenth the price, you should be able to sell a lot of them.

Jasc Software Inc., a Minnesota software company with 60 employees, does just that. Its PaintShop Pro 5.1 is a graphics image-editing program that has the feel, and much of the look, of Adobe Photoshop. It includes almost all of the basic tools that Photoshop people use every day. Many of these have the same names and features, some are slight variations in name (e.g. Clone Brush for Rubber Stamp Tool), but they perform pretty much the same.

As a wanna-be, Jasc Software has followed the Silicon Valley mantra "market share, market share, market share ...". Versions 4.x and earlier were practically given away or bundled with some other product or offer. The product got out there and built up a user base. With Ver 5.x, however, PaintShop Pro becomes a contender. It now provides layers, which are the key to graphic composition, flexibility, and productivity. Now there is a definite attempt to charge at least a little for the program. The sticker price is $99, but surfing shows numbers down to $40 (Cyberian Outpost #97105 after Conditional Rebate).

Make no mistake about it. Anyone who does not now run Photoshop should have this product. For a very small amount of money you have as much of the functional capabilities of Photoshop as you are going to need until you get to the level of the graphics wunderkind.

The presenter at our April meeting was Roger L. Creighton, www.rollanet.org/~pcprimer from Rolla MO. Roger introduced himself as an Editor/Writer of computer articles for newspapers and magazines. He also has a radio program and writes a golf column. During the course of the presentation he sort of hinted that he really would rather be out playing golf. He is a long time user of PaintShop Pro and as a result of several very favorable articles about it, he became an evangelist for Jasc. He still keeps his day job, but goes around to user groups demonstrating what PaintShop Pro can do. He showed us the basic layout and features of the program and did some enhancement and touch up of an old photograph. He demonstrated the layer capabilities by popping a rooster around in a city scene.

Roger's presentation went fairly well. He had difficulties when a few things went wrong and he had to skip around a bit, but this is a hazard of any presentation where the speaker has to run the computer and talk at the same time. He punctuated his talk with frequent slightly sarcastic remarks that did little to help the cause, but he got across that the functional capabilities are there. He emphasized the Jasc line that this is a user-friendly program easy to learn and use. If you already know Photoshop, it may be, but there are a great many image editing tools and techniques that will not be familiar to someone who has only used Windows Paint in the past. Also, there are parameters with everything and the inherent complexities of color to deal with. I believe that Microsoft's PhotoDraw has a much more intuitive user interface and is designed for people who do not need or want to spend time with graphics details.