Product Comparison : PaintShop Pro X4 Vs. Photoshop

Rather than term it a product comparison between Paint Shop Pro X4 and Photoshop, this page really should have been titled, Why I'll Be Purchasing Paint Shop Pro X4 but Wouldn't Touch Photoshop With a Ten Foot Pole and a Gas Mask.

In all fairness, the following caveat must be posted: The key "killer issue" for Photoshop turned out to be its enormous space-gobbling size and the extensive time needed to download. My wife and I live off grid. Therefore, we have satellite Internet--because nothing else is available.

Clarification for those who don't know: For the satellite Internet customer, there is no such thing as unlimited broadband. The Internet provider--Hughes in this case--rations how much "stuff" we can download in any one 24-hour period. Exceeding a preset limit will result in punishment; your computer more or less moves at glacial speed (if that) for the next day or two.

See? If you have a cable Internet connection, you can probably stop reading right here and be none the worse for wear!

However, just in case you really do want to know the gory details, here we go.

Note: All photo editing on this page was done using a combination of Windows Photo Gallery (for initial cropping, color adjustment, and histogram adjustment) plus Paint Shop Pro X4 (for everything else including the addition of text). With one exception: Pixlr wound up handling the text that was added to the last picture (below).

Warning: I'm one of those right wingnut whack job conservative Tea Party types who was motivated to learn photo editing for political purposes. If the political messages in the following photos are not your cup of tea (so to speak), feel free to hold your nose whle gleaning any product comparison tidbits that might possibly redound to your benefit.

Who knows; maybe you'll even take up Liberal Cartooning to counter my stuff.

Last night, playing around with the program, I flat fell in love at first byte with Paint Shop Pro X4. Got lost in the pixels and never wanted to get found, you might say.

Okay, you'd be wrong--technically--but you might say it.

True, there's a learning curve as there is with any new software. But it wasn't bad at all. How to layer in--I just answered my own question!!!

Excuse me: Gotta think this through while the -Eureka!- light bulb is still illuminating the darkness in yon mental cavern.

See, last night I couldn't figure out how to make a cartoon style balloon accept text inside its confines like a good little cartoon balloon should. It's really weird--though potentially useful. Drop a balloon in the photo...and when text is added, it circled the outer balloon edge like it was a freaking force field or something.

Ah, but layers. Figured out what a layer is. You do "something" to the photo. Close the photo for a second, saving the change and making it permanent.

I do believe that change counts as a "layer". Of course you knew that. But I didn't.

Okay, I'm back.

Here's the thing: Last night, it took Paint Shop Pro X4 somewhere between two and three hours to download onto my computer. Nasty, but I could live with that--and the results were worth it.

Tonight, I tried downloading Photoshop. After a similar length of time (more than two hours), the massive program (3,746 megabytes according to the screen prompt) was showing maybe 1/6 done on the colored progress bar.

Meanwhile, the rest of the computer was...not particularly happy.

Scratch that. Photoshop may have this cool Content Aware remove-an-object-from-the-picture technology, but it can go straight to photo editing Hell for all I care. Kiss my pixels! Besides it's more than three times as expensive as Paint Shop Pro.

There you go. That's my mini-rant against Photoshop. The rest of the page will be devoted to saying good things about Paint Shop Pro. Well...and maybe a bad thing or two about President Obama's extreme narcissism and/or his socialist policies. There might also be a pitch underscoring the need for We the People to make sure he ends up fulfilling his destiny as the worst one term Preesident in our nation's history come Election Day 2012.

That last part's right there in my Hub profile. You can check it out for yourself if you think I"m lying.

Now, off to see about layering some text into a cartoon balloon somewhere. In the meantime, the next photo was taken on a dark and fiery night....

Success! Houston, we have cartoon balloon liftoff! Complete with text!

Simmer down there, Homer. Let's go through the steps of how the final photo (below) was edited. Step by step, okay?

1. First, the picture was opened in Windows Photo Gallery. Certain basic adjustments are more quickly and easily accomplished there than anywhere else . The picture was cropped and the Histogram adjustment cranked up a bit to intensifiy the colors and sharpness.

Plus, the color saturation was cranked up as far as possible. How far? To that point just before the colors start breaking up in the clouds that were there originally.

Had I known I'd be blacking out the sky, that wouldn't have mattered--and the color could have brought out a cool effect in the rocks.

Oh, well. Can't win 'em all.

2. Next, Paint Shop Pro X4. The sky was darkened using the Paint Brush Tool set at a Hardness of 20 (very soft) and a Size of 200 (rather large). While still working that same layer, the two cartoon balloons were applied...and the layer was closed.

Things were looking good. Oddly enough, though, the Text Tool still didn't want to work right. I may have a clue about that--but won't go into it until I've solved the mystery.

3. Because of the Text Tool problem, we (the photo and I) moved online to the free version of Pixlr where the text was added. Pixlr wasn't doing so well with its Text Tool either...until the Edit menu was opened and Select All got clicked.

After that, magic (cheap version, not perfect placement) happened.

Saved the photo back to the computer and...done.

Our regular readers realize most if not all of these political pieces end the same way and will continue to do so until after Election Day this coming fall--which will hopefully see the political fall of a certain highly placed former community organizer. However, with this page covering more than one topic, we'll go with a double-barreled closing.

Remember in November...and remember Photoshop sucks if you're either short on funds or living off grid.

"We understand that freedom isn't free. It's one of the many things about the American people our politicians underestimate."

--Sarah Palin in America by Heart, p. 20