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Jasc Paint Shop Pro 6 v/s MGI PhotoSuite 4 Platinum

Toronto Star Fast Forward column for September 14, 2000

Copyright ©, Myles White, 2000

This week, we're going to look at two products, Jasc Photo Shop Pro 6.02 and MGI's PhotoSuite 4 Platinum.

Here's the scenario. You've got your new computer and perhaps a scanner or digital camera. You want to do some desktop publishing or to put up a site on the World Wide Web. You quickly discover that programs you use to do your publishing or Web layout are great at letting you place pictures and words just where you want them, but none of them are really good at letting you edit the artwork - both photos or scans (bitmaps, also known as raster images) and your own drawings and text (known as vector images). 

If you own a PC you have reasonable choices from Adobe, Corel, MGI, Microsoft, and the relatively obscure Jasc Software. 

When you start looking at prices, that range of choices may come down a bit. For example, Adobe's PhotoShop 5.5 and the new Illustrator 9 have street prices of $999 and $581.99 respectively (yes, there's a "Light Edition" of PhotoShop 5.5 but we're focusing on full packages here). 

The CorelDRAW 9 suite provides DRAW 9 for vector drawing and PhotoPaint 9 for bitmap editing (although both let you combine vector and bitmap images), with a street price around 769.99. 

MGI, the only other Canadian company in the list along with Corel, has a variety of still and video editing products, but the one that fits here, PhotoSuite 4 Platinum, sells for about $64. 

Microsoft is the low-price leader in the field with Picture It! 2000 at $54.99 and their Graphics Studio Home edition at $61.99. PhotoDraw, its combined product, is selling for around $129. 

Jasc Photo Shop Pro 6.02 (PSP 6.02) is in about the middle of the field at $149.

Features Head to Head

Text features: PSP 6.02 lets you edit text after you've placed it over an image, align it along a curve, or mix colours, styles - bold, etc. - and fonts in the same line of text. You can place and edit text in PhotoSuite 4, but you cannot curve it, mix fonts and colours on the same line, or choose font styles other than italic or underlined.

Drawing: PSP 6.02 lets you draw shapes or editable Bezier curves on top of your images. PaintShop 4 lets you draw shapes and lines, but they are not Bezier curves and can't be changed or re-sized. You do get a palette of filled or unfilled shapes with borders. PSP 6.02 takes its vector image adjustments even further afield when it comes to filling them with gradients (a blending of colours in a filled object). New in this version, PSP 6 allows you to create custom gradients using more than two colours, to blend them with the background through changing their transparency, and to save custom gradients for use again. MGI's PhotoSuite 4 has no gradients

Effects: Jasc has added 20 "new" deformations and effects to that palette, another new feature that lets you add stylistic picture frames to images, and corrected one of the product's earlier lapses by allowing addition of PhotoShop plug-ins, among others. PhotoSuite 4 is a match. 

Layers: It's when we get to what Jasc does with layers that things get interesting. Each new object, whether vector object or bitmapped image, that you add to an existing document, is placed on its own "layer" within the document. Layers can be moved, can be hidden (good if you draw a curve for a text path to follow, but then don't want to see the line when you're done), and can have a variety of effects added to them (such as transparency, lighting, dodge and burn, and a long list of others). Not only do you get a choice of whether a layer is for a vector object or image, but there are adjustment layers as well and I have to confess a fondness for this approach. 

Normally, when you want to adjust brightness and contrast, hue and saturation, colour balance, tone curves, colour channels, input and output levels, or fiddle with posterization, inversion, or clipping thresholds, the changes you make affect the original image unless you save it under a new name. While you're working, particularly when you're mixing several adjustments, it becomes very difficult to add and subtract changes (for example, it's difficult to judge a colour channel adjustment made after a brightness/contrast adjustment, if you decide you'd like to see what it would be like before you changed the brightness or grey channel level, etc.). 

However, here you can simply make a whole layer invisible and turn its particular adjustment on or off at will (and go back to change it without affecting what you just did with another layer). I know this sounds a bit complicated, but in operation, it works very smoothly. 

Rollups: The layers palette, along with all others, rolls up out of the way on your screen. That's not a unique feature, but one that I do like is that you can set the palette to unroll automatically when you wave your cursor over it. 

Pressure: Like Corel's Painter (recently acquired from MetaCreations), Jasc PSP 6.02 has support for a pressure-sensitive pen/tablet combo, but you get to choose which features will respond to pressure (opacity, colour, or width - or just some or all of them). Unlike Painter, it has only a few "natural media" settings (paintbrush, pen, pencil, crayon, marker, chalk, charcoal) with a limited number of adjustments to each one.

Redeye: PhotoSuite 4 doesn't have layers, but it does have several automated touchup features, such as removing red-eye (humans only; it doesn't work on animals), scratches, blemishes and other artifacts. It also adds an effect brush (to darken or lighten or perform other effects on small portions of the photo), a photosprayer that takes small images and, well, sprays them over your image (lots of choices on disc or you can create your own), an "undo eraser" that lets you undo specific actions from small areas of the picture only, and a flood fill that acts as an interactive tool for flooding only small areas. PSP 6.02 has none of these enhancements (although similar tools are promised in version 7.0, due to ship in a couple of months).

File it: PSP 6.02 provides a file management window that mimics the thumbnail view in Windows 98 SE and Me, for those who haven't switched, making it easier to find images by viewing them instead of just their file names. PhotoSuite does, too. Made a mistake? Both provide multiple levels of "undo" and "redo."

Compose: Rather than you creating a page, importing several images, then arranging them yourself, you can have both programs do this task for you, then print the result. One of the little annoyances I found in PhotoSuite is that many of its features (drawing shapes, the effects brush and so on) only work when you're attacking an original image. Once you move to the next step, composing one or several pictures into projects such as posters, e-mail cards, or any of the several other project templates that ship with the product, these tools disappear. However, the text tool is only available in the Compose module. PSP 6.02 doesn't provide templates, projects, or anything similar to the Compose feature. Everything is done on the same page (albeit with the layers noted above). To offset this, PhotoSuite has routines that make it easy to cut one image out of another (for adding to a montage elsewhere), but PSP doesn't.

Click (RANT): It is becoming increasingly common to find, particularly in image editing products, the manufacturers loudly tout as "Support for nn Digital Cameras" as though this was a good thing (by the way, PSP 6.02 supports 120 of them, while PhotoSuite's list is capped at fewer than 20). I suppose the support is necessary, but I'm not so sure about how good it is to need it. To understand why, you had to have been around during the bad old PC days before Windows, when DOS ruled. 

In these pre-historic times, the software you bought had to match the printer you owned. Change either one and you might discover that the application you used no longer supported the printer you had. Printers shipped with drivers for multiple software applications and the software shipped with multiple printer drivers. Both were usually dated. Much hassle. 

When the portion of the industry that made scanners and photo-editing (or at least photo-using) applications came along, the players got their heads together and developed TWAIN (Technology Without An Independent Name). It was a sound concept. TWAIN would be a common driver structure and if both a scanner and an application supported it, you could (or should) be able to scan directly into the program without having to start some other piece of potentially non-complimentary software as an intermediate. These folks, led by Adobe, HP, and others (wisely) decided that if they did it any other way, scanners as a product line simply wouldn't catch on with consumers. With only the odd company who tried to botch it up as the exceptions, TWAIN was an unprecedented success and it made life a heck of a lot simpler for consumers. 

Now we come to digital cameras. Every model I've tested in the past few years has been TWAIN compliant (and so are both PhotoSuite 4 and Paint Shop Pro 6.02), but almost every camera manufacturer adds its own image software with only rudimentary image editing tools. They're rudimentary because the applications' primary function is to get all of the pictures in the camera on screen at the same time - something TWAIN, in its present configuration cannot do, because the current "standard" doesn't support batch processing. It's strictly one image at a time. The result is that everyone is having to get into the act once again to provide software hooks for various models of camera within their products. Even Microsoft has moved into the field, with the new Camera/Scanner Wizard feature in Windows Me (previewed last week) that attempts to provide a common driver for both cameras and scanners. 

So, dear TWAIN folks and the digital camera industry. If it isn't already too late, please wake up. It's time for a revision of the TWAIN standard to provide for multiple image handling, otherwise, what you predicted when you started all this with scanners will come to pass in the camera field. People will get fed up and declare a plague on all your houses. End of rant number 139 and back to PhotoSuite and Paint Shop Pro.

Home stretch:

Over all, I'd rate Jasc Paint Shop Pro in the mid range of similar products. It does a better job of letting you mix vector and raster images than PhotoSuite, but this version has no automated processes for creating masks or eliminating redeye (as two examples). It's not the product you'd choose for creating photo montages for homework. For that, I'd try either PhotoSuite 4 (at less than half the price) or Picture It! (ditto).

PSP 6.02 doesn't have the range of either vector or raster tools that the full-blown versions of Adobe PhotoShop and Illustrator or the CorelDRAW suite provide, but it is significantly less expensive, too, and what it does provide may show you whether you need one of the more robust products or not.

More info: Jasc Software is at www.jasc.com. MGI is to be found at www.mgisoft.com

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