7 ms·

Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro

395 points by ian_lotinsky 8y ago

uberman 8y ago
PSP was fantastic. I stopped using it when Corel acquired it though.
busterarm 8y ago
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.
- and0 8y ago
  My copy of PSP 5 came with my computer, and may have been my gateway into graphic design. I'd still take Photoshop over it, but it was a surprisingly solid alternative.
madengr 8y ago
Xylon looks fun to play. I miss old and simple computer games.
- ian_lotinsky 8y ago
  Thanks! We gave up on it because the game was too easy and RSD Game-Maker--not to be confused with YoYo Games GameMaker--wasn't sophisticated enough to build a real game. It was a heck of a lot of fun to use though.
ariehkovler 8y ago
Paint Shop Pro was the best. 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.
StavrosK 8y ago
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.
- chatmasta 8y ago
  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.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    That's true. I still don't know why we said "using two screwdrivers for these two kinds of screw is too hard, here's a sledgehammer instead", rather than build tooling to make it easier to build cross-platform programs... I'm pretty hopeful these days about Qt for Python and this build system: https://build-system.fman.io/ https://build-system.fman.io/ Unfortunately, it costs money even if your app is OSS, in some cases.
  - kijin 8y ago
    I wouldn't mind if PaintShop Pro made less frequent releases. None of the features I care about has changed in a significant way in the last 18 years or so. I used PSP 7 in the early oughts to do some web design work on the side; I still use PSP X8 every now and then to make transparent PNGs. As long as it gets the job done on a platform I have access to, I don't care how many platforms they don't support.
  - mark-r 8y ago
    PSP was not cross platform, it was Windows only. I don't know if that's changed recently but I suspect it hasn't.
    - 8y ago
ThomW 8y ago
I love PSP. It was one of the few applications worth the money the author charged for it. Up until recently I was using PSP5 for all of my taster image editing, but I reinstalled my OS drive and I don’t know where I stashed my setup.exe for it and the much-needed patch. Great stuff.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
"You are on day 1,439 of your 30-day trial"
- thetrumanshow 8y ago
  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.
  - Chronos309 8y ago
    Around day 2,000 is when the guilt kicked in for me.
stupidcar 8y ago
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.
- cpach 8y ago
  Wasn’t Macromedia Fireworks also capable of doing both raster and vector?
  - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    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.
    - derefr 8y ago
      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 each texture bound 1:1 to a particular rectangle shape, with the shape and its texture together referred to as a "raster image." Every time you changed anything, the whole thing just got re-rendered onto a canvas using the Flash rendering logic. When you saved the PNG "document", it kept all the document chunks, but added the baked rendered representation it had been using for previewing as a basic PNG chunk at the end of the document. Thus, it was kind of an actual PNG file. (But the flattened PNG chunk was only "the document" as much as the JPEG cover image inside an .epub is "the book.")
pbourke 8y ago
Is there a descendent-in-spirit of PSP in active development nowadays?
- teh_klev 8y ago
  Yes, PSP is still in development: https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-pro/ https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-pro/
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Maybe Affinity Photo? https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/
- bluedino 8y ago
  Paint.net?
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  Affinity Photo or (Mac only) Pixelmator is probably closest. I know that it's widely hated on HN but I still find GIMP is quite suitable for nearly everything. It integrates poorly on macOS though.
teh_klev 8y ago
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. [0]: http://www.persits.com/index.html http://www.persits.com/index.html
- nailer 8y ago
  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.
  - teh_klev 8y ago
    I had a (ahem, cough, shh) hooky copy of Photoshop back in the mid 2000's but always got frustrated with it and reverted back to PSP. PSP always made more sense to my non-graphics designer brain.
  - PeterMikhailov 8y ago
    All of the anti counterfeiting US currency code in PS probably slows it down.
    - mark-r 8y ago
      The same code is in PSP, and it only slows down specific operations.
- 8y ago
DanielleMolloy 8y ago
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.
- mynewtb 8y ago
  > GIMP seems like a great project but has a terrible overblown UI Have you tried the new 2.10 and the single window mode?
  - Drdrdrq 8y ago
    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.
CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
I apologize if this an insensitive question, but a Google search wasn't very enlightening. Did Robert Voit die, or was this prompted solely by the author's reminiscence?
- erdosnew 8y ago
  i have the exact same thought from reading this
- LeonM 8y ago
  I'm curious as well. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasc_Software
- ian_lotinsky 8y ago
  I certainly hope he is alive and well! This is simply me reminiscing and expressing gratefulness for something that helped shape my career.
- throwawayxrvv 8y ago
  He's alive and lives in peaceful Scottsdale, Arizona.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I worried about the same. I'm very happy he's alright. I forgot about PSP. But Reading about it brings lots of memories. It was a great program, just like its author.
dchester195 8y ago
Are you going to release Xylon for people to play?
- ian_lotinsky 8y ago
  The video captures the entire game. Still want a copy? ;)
zokier 8y ago
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.
- RodericDay 8y ago
  now apply this to Google and Facebook's "free" offerings
  - zokier 8y ago
    Big difference is that those generally do not delineate naturally into "expensive/professional" and "low-cost/hobbyist" markets.
- Patrick_Devine 8y ago
  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?
  - zokier 8y ago
    Well I'm not a fan of "open core" products, for not all too dissimilar reasons. But I'll admit the situation with open source and commercial actors is fair bit more complicated, with no easy answers (unless you are Stallman)
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  > piratism "Piracy" is the usual word.
  - Chronos309 8y ago
    I like piratism more...but you're right....
zokier 8y ago
> 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.
bbernard 8y ago
Everybody here is talking about PSP 5.0+. 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 8y ago
  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. Amazing piece of software and Minnesota!
  - mark-r 8y ago
    Version 5 was also the first one that forced you to pay after the trial period was over. Did that have anything to do with your decision?
    - kmeade 8y ago
      No, I was using a paid for version. I just noticed you can buy a brand-new copy of Paintshop Pro for $48 (cheap!) at https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-pro/standard/ https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-pro/stand... I'm thinking about it.
      - mark-r 8y ago
        It occasionally goes on sale for even cheaper. Plus you can find it bundled for free sometimes, e.g. with a Panasonic camera lens: https://www.adorama.com/ipc2517mnk.html https://www.adorama.com/ipc2517mnk.html
callumprentice 8y ago
Fascinating article here about Robert - https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxa53/how-an-airline-pilot-took-on-adobe-photoshopand-nearly-won https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxa53/how-an-air... 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 8y ago
  Primarily the Name JASC was short for “Just Another Software Company” but later it was changed to “Jets and Software Company”. [1] https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/pages/old-brands/jasc/ https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/pages/old-brands/jasc/
  - nasredin 8y ago
    JASC also made "Animation Shop", a GIF editor. It won't open modern x264 files, but works fine with uncompressed video. And the GIF format just won't die thanks to hipsters. Thank you JASC and hipsters!
bondolo 8y ago
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.
drakonka 8y ago
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.
fhj 8y ago
PSP was the only program I knew about that showed images inside a folder in the folder's thumbnail. This was a very time-saving feature!
techload 8y ago
PSP was and still is amazing. And while we are down the memories lane, one thing that strikes me as incredible was running Ventura Publisher (DOS) with that graphic UI on a 286.
mark-r 8y ago
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.
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  OODA Loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
Theodores 8y ago
My copy was legit, paid for by work. I made weather icons with it in 8 bit colour with transparency - think of animated GIF's. The hardware was a Compaq Deskpro with 2Mb of video RAM. I was a mere techie with 8 bit home computing experience, not a trained graphic artist. My employers were not the sort to have pirated software on the premises, however, the process if getting a purchase order for £30 software rather than £10000 software seemed almost more awkward. My colleagues who did have the £40K SGI workstations with the £10K+ Parallax Matador software and giant Wacom tablets just did not have the tools needed to make the all important weather icons. This was in the days before maps had been sorted out so they mostly drew artistic interpretations of maps, with limited knowledge of geography - quite embarrassing really. But, you know, gotta work as a team. The icons had to be made as sprites and only a certain amount of RAM was available, I think they also had to align on some type of kilobyte boundaries too. Needless to say JASC Paintshop Pro was the perfect tool for the job. I did have access to Photoshop which actually came full version with a scanner. My colleagues in graphics saw Photoshop as a cut down PC tool, not really professional at all. So I could not get to meet with them in the middle whereby they would be able to do the icons and somehow get them into the formats needed for broadcast. That thought was tantamount to asking them to sweep the streets and empty the bins - below them. Maybe I stuck with PSP longer than I should have done as I did have a bit of a learning curve a few years later when Photoshop became the vital tool for part of a job I moved on to. Due to consolidation in TV and nobody being able to pay £100K for a seat for graphic artists my colleagues also had to move on from their tools of choice. They chose to be dinosaurs, to be usurped by kids with dirt cheap tools. Sad really. So many games of status and other delusions made up the reality of working in broadcast television at that time, the toys being part of that. The funniest thing I found was the giant Wacom tablet gorilla arm problem. If you were a proper graphic designer then you had to have the biggest of huge Wacom tablets, great in principle except the action is all in the wrist. They would be dragging their elbows to the far corners of the desk to get to a palette colour or menu item. Most of my PSP work was done with a mouse and 1280 x 1024 15" CRT monitor. However I did get a lucky break when learning Photoshop as I had a small Wacom Tablet and an excellent mentor in a former graphic designer that just barked hotkeys at me. I did what he wanted done in doubleplusgood time, studio crew of twenty waiting... Creating masks and other image corrections were done in the way that bluescreen video is done, dealing with the whole image and doing so very quickly. Only years later did I understand what some of those toolbox icons were or what the hotkeys corresponded to in the menus. Sometimes it pains me to see today's graphic artists spending all day doing basic artwork stuff where they are manually deleting pixels and drawing around things, headphones plugged in, no knowledge of hotkeys known. Despite being retired the lessons that my mentors taught me come back to haunt me and I do a little bit of teaching. PSP was the opening for me to not be just a mere techie but to cross that imaginary line into doing creative work. There is no point being adamant that you are just an artist and don't do tech stuff. It is also cowardly to be a techie and never do creative artwork stuff. For me PSP enabled me to let go of the handrails and become a creative techie.
Zaskoda 8y ago
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.
duggan 8y ago
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.
ajenner 8y ago
I'm another person who regularly uses PSP (version 4 in my case) for most of my day to day bitmap editing tasks - it's fast, stable and has most of the features I need so I've never felt the need to upgrade!
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
I loved, loved, loved Paint Shop Pro. I think my all-time favorite version was 7. Back then (2003-2008) I used to do a lot of web design, and I would do all the graphics with Flash and PSP. I tried Photoshop 2-3 times during these years, and was always surprised to see how terrible the UX was in comparison with PSP. Good memories.
crtasm 8y ago
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. Never did find out if he knew about the latter.
subir 8y ago
Jasc PSP 5 was the first full-blown image editor I ever used. Those were the days when I was taking baby steps with web design. Absolutely loved the no-nonsense, workflow. Not to mention, it seemed to pack every feature imaginable in a small, cheap package!
Markoff 8y ago
the article would have more credibility if author would not try to promote his game in it
- ian_lotinsky 8y ago
  Hi Markoff! I agree with your sentiment, but I'm not promoting my game in the least. It was created back in the mid-90s, never was released to the public, and never will be. Robert expressed that he looked forward to playing the games we made with PSP, and we never shipped a game he could see. The video captures the entire gameplay simply to show him what we were up to as kids as a part of our thank you. I hope this clarifies things for you. Thanks, Ian
cJ0th 8y ago
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?

395 points by ian_lotinsky 8y ago

PSP was fantastic. I stopped using it when Corel acquired it though.

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.

and0 8y ago
My copy of PSP 5 came with my computer, and may have been my gateway into graphic design. I'd still take Photoshop over it, but it was a surprisingly solid alternative.

madengr 8y ago

Xylon looks fun to play. I miss old and simple computer games.

ian_lotinsky 8y ago
Thanks! We gave up on it because the game was too easy and RSD Game-Maker--not to be confused with YoYo Games GameMaker--wasn't sophisticated enough to build a real game. It was a heck of a lot of fun to use though.

ariehkovler 8y ago

Paint Shop Pro was the best. 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.

StavrosK 8y ago

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.

chatmasta 8y ago
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.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  That's true. I still don't know why we said "using two screwdrivers for these two kinds of screw is too hard, here's a sledgehammer instead", rather than build tooling to make it easier to build cross-platform programs... I'm pretty hopeful these days about Qt for Python and this build system: https://build-system.fman.io/ https://build-system.fman.io/ Unfortunately, it costs money even if your app is OSS, in some cases.
- kijin 8y ago
  I wouldn't mind if PaintShop Pro made less frequent releases. None of the features I care about has changed in a significant way in the last 18 years or so. I used PSP 7 in the early oughts to do some web design work on the side; I still use PSP X8 every now and then to make transparent PNGs. As long as it gets the job done on a platform I have access to, I don't care how many platforms they don't support.
- mark-r 8y ago
  PSP was not cross platform, it was Windows only. I don't know if that's changed recently but I suspect it hasn't.
  - 8y ago

ThomW 8y ago

I love PSP. It was one of the few applications worth the money the author charged for it. Up until recently I was using PSP5 for all of my taster image editing, but I reinstalled my OS drive and I don’t know where I stashed my setup.exe for it and the much-needed patch. Great stuff.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

"You are on day 1,439 of your 30-day trial"

thetrumanshow 8y ago
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.
- Chronos309 8y ago
  Around day 2,000 is when the guilt kicked in for me.

stupidcar 8y ago

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.

cpach 8y ago
Wasn’t Macromedia Fireworks also capable of doing both raster and vector?
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  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.
  - derefr 8y ago
    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 each texture bound 1:1 to a particular rectangle shape, with the shape and its texture together referred to as a "raster image." Every time you changed anything, the whole thing just got re-rendered onto a canvas using the Flash rendering logic. When you saved the PNG "document", it kept all the document chunks, but added the baked rendered representation it had been using for previewing as a basic PNG chunk at the end of the document. Thus, it was kind of an actual PNG file. (But the flattened PNG chunk was only "the document" as much as the JPEG cover image inside an .epub is "the book.")

pbourke 8y ago

Is there a descendent-in-spirit of PSP in active development nowadays?

teh_klev 8y ago
Yes, PSP is still in development: https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-pro/ https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-pro/
jdietrich 8y ago
Maybe Affinity Photo? https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/
bluedino 8y ago
Paint.net?
LeoPanthera 8y ago
Affinity Photo or (Mac only) Pixelmator is probably closest. I know that it's widely hated on HN but I still find GIMP is quite suitable for nearly everything. It integrates poorly on macOS though.

teh_klev 8y ago

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. [0]: http://www.persits.com/index.html http://www.persits.com/index.html

nailer 8y ago
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.
- teh_klev 8y ago
  I had a (ahem, cough, shh) hooky copy of Photoshop back in the mid 2000's but always got frustrated with it and reverted back to PSP. PSP always made more sense to my non-graphics designer brain.
- PeterMikhailov 8y ago
  All of the anti counterfeiting US currency code in PS probably slows it down.
  - mark-r 8y ago
    The same code is in PSP, and it only slows down specific operations.
8y ago

DanielleMolloy 8y ago

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.

mynewtb 8y ago
> GIMP seems like a great project but has a terrible overblown UI Have you tried the new 2.10 and the single window mode?
- Drdrdrq 8y ago
  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.

CiPHPerCoder 8y ago

I apologize if this an insensitive question, but a Google search wasn't very enlightening. Did Robert Voit die, or was this prompted solely by the author's reminiscence?

erdosnew 8y ago
i have the exact same thought from reading this
LeonM 8y ago
I'm curious as well. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasc_Software
ian_lotinsky 8y ago
I certainly hope he is alive and well! This is simply me reminiscing and expressing gratefulness for something that helped shape my career.
throwawayxrvv 8y ago
He's alive and lives in peaceful Scottsdale, Arizona.
agumonkey 8y ago
I worried about the same. I'm very happy he's alright. I forgot about PSP. But Reading about it brings lots of memories. It was a great program, just like its author.

dchester195 8y ago

Are you going to release Xylon for people to play?

ian_lotinsky 8y ago
The video captures the entire game. Still want a copy? ;)

zokier 8y ago

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.

RodericDay 8y ago
now apply this to Google and Facebook's "free" offerings
- zokier 8y ago
  Big difference is that those generally do not delineate naturally into "expensive/professional" and "low-cost/hobbyist" markets.
Patrick_Devine 8y ago
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?
- zokier 8y ago
  Well I'm not a fan of "open core" products, for not all too dissimilar reasons. But I'll admit the situation with open source and commercial actors is fair bit more complicated, with no easy answers (unless you are Stallman)
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
> piratism "Piracy" is the usual word.
- Chronos309 8y ago
  I like piratism more...but you're right....

zokier 8y ago

> 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.

bbernard 8y ago

Everybody here is talking about PSP 5.0+. 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 8y ago
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. Amazing piece of software and Minnesota!
- mark-r 8y ago
  Version 5 was also the first one that forced you to pay after the trial period was over. Did that have anything to do with your decision?
  - kmeade 8y ago
    No, I was using a paid for version. I just noticed you can buy a brand-new copy of Paintshop Pro for $48 (cheap!) at https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-pro/standard/ https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-pro/stand... I'm thinking about it.
    - mark-r 8y ago
      It occasionally goes on sale for even cheaper. Plus you can find it bundled for free sometimes, e.g. with a Panasonic camera lens: https://www.adorama.com/ipc2517mnk.html https://www.adorama.com/ipc2517mnk.html

callumprentice 8y ago

Fascinating article here about Robert - https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxa53/how-an-airline-pilot-took-on-adobe-photoshopand-nearly-won https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxa53/how-an-air... 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 8y ago
Primarily the Name JASC was short for “Just Another Software Company” but later it was changed to “Jets and Software Company”. [1] https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/pages/old-brands/jasc/ https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/pages/old-brands/jasc/
- nasredin 8y ago
  JASC also made "Animation Shop", a GIF editor. It won't open modern x264 files, but works fine with uncompressed video. And the GIF format just won't die thanks to hipsters. Thank you JASC and hipsters!

bondolo 8y ago

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.

drakonka 8y ago

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.

fhj 8y ago

PSP was the only program I knew about that showed images inside a folder in the folder's thumbnail. This was a very time-saving feature!

techload 8y ago

PSP was and still is amazing. And while we are down the memories lane, one thing that strikes me as incredible was running Ventura Publisher (DOS) with that graphic UI on a 286.

mark-r 8y ago

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.

patrickg_zill 8y ago
OODA Loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

Theodores 8y ago

My copy was legit, paid for by work. I made weather icons with it in 8 bit colour with transparency - think of animated GIF's. The hardware was a Compaq Deskpro with 2Mb of video RAM. I was a mere techie with 8 bit home computing experience, not a trained graphic artist. My employers were not the sort to have pirated software on the premises, however, the process if getting a purchase order for £30 software rather than £10000 software seemed almost more awkward. My colleagues who did have the £40K SGI workstations with the £10K+ Parallax Matador software and giant Wacom tablets just did not have the tools needed to make the all important weather icons. This was in the days before maps had been sorted out so they mostly drew artistic interpretations of maps, with limited knowledge of geography - quite embarrassing really. But, you know, gotta work as a team. The icons had to be made as sprites and only a certain amount of RAM was available, I think they also had to align on some type of kilobyte boundaries too. Needless to say JASC Paintshop Pro was the perfect tool for the job. I did have access to Photoshop which actually came full version with a scanner. My colleagues in graphics saw Photoshop as a cut down PC tool, not really professional at all. So I could not get to meet with them in the middle whereby they would be able to do the icons and somehow get them into the formats needed for broadcast. That thought was tantamount to asking them to sweep the streets and empty the bins - below them. Maybe I stuck with PSP longer than I should have done as I did have a bit of a learning curve a few years later when Photoshop became the vital tool for part of a job I moved on to. Due to consolidation in TV and nobody being able to pay £100K for a seat for graphic artists my colleagues also had to move on from their tools of choice. They chose to be dinosaurs, to be usurped by kids with dirt cheap tools. Sad really. So many games of status and other delusions made up the reality of working in broadcast television at that time, the toys being part of that. The funniest thing I found was the giant Wacom tablet gorilla arm problem. If you were a proper graphic designer then you had to have the biggest of huge Wacom tablets, great in principle except the action is all in the wrist. They would be dragging their elbows to the far corners of the desk to get to a palette colour or menu item. Most of my PSP work was done with a mouse and 1280 x 1024 15" CRT monitor. However I did get a lucky break when learning Photoshop as I had a small Wacom Tablet and an excellent mentor in a former graphic designer that just barked hotkeys at me. I did what he wanted done in doubleplusgood time, studio crew of twenty waiting... Creating masks and other image corrections were done in the way that bluescreen video is done, dealing with the whole image and doing so very quickly. Only years later did I understand what some of those toolbox icons were or what the hotkeys corresponded to in the menus. Sometimes it pains me to see today's graphic artists spending all day doing basic artwork stuff where they are manually deleting pixels and drawing around things, headphones plugged in, no knowledge of hotkeys known. Despite being retired the lessons that my mentors taught me come back to haunt me and I do a little bit of teaching. PSP was the opening for me to not be just a mere techie but to cross that imaginary line into doing creative work. There is no point being adamant that you are just an artist and don't do tech stuff. It is also cowardly to be a techie and never do creative artwork stuff. For me PSP enabled me to let go of the handrails and become a creative techie.

Zaskoda 8y ago

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.

duggan 8y ago

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.

ajenner 8y ago

I'm another person who regularly uses PSP (version 4 in my case) for most of my day to day bitmap editing tasks - it's fast, stable and has most of the features I need so I've never felt the need to upgrade!

simonebrunozzi 8y ago

I loved, loved, loved Paint Shop Pro. I think my all-time favorite version was 7. Back then (2003-2008) I used to do a lot of web design, and I would do all the graphics with Flash and PSP. I tried Photoshop 2-3 times during these years, and was always surprised to see how terrible the UX was in comparison with PSP. Good memories.

crtasm 8y ago

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. Never did find out if he knew about the latter.

subir 8y ago

Jasc PSP 5 was the first full-blown image editor I ever used. Those were the days when I was taking baby steps with web design. Absolutely loved the no-nonsense, workflow. Not to mention, it seemed to pack every feature imaginable in a small, cheap package!

Markoff 8y ago

the article would have more credibility if author would not try to promote his game in it

ian_lotinsky 8y ago
Hi Markoff! I agree with your sentiment, but I'm not promoting my game in the least. It was created back in the mid-90s, never was released to the public, and never will be. Robert expressed that he looked forward to playing the games we made with PSP, and we never shipped a game he could see. The video captures the entire gameplay simply to show him what we were up to as kids as a part of our thank you. I hope this clarifies things for you. Thanks, Ian

cJ0th 8y ago

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?