Photo software strikes a pose

-- EDN, 4/13/2000

It's nearly four months after the winter holidays, and you've mastered that digital camera or scanner you received or bought for yourself. The only thing keeping you from becoming the next Ansel Adams is the primitive image-editing software that came with the hardware. But you don't have hundreds of dollars to spend on the latest version of Adobe (www.adobe.com) Photoshop. What's a budding photographer to do? Here are two alternatives.

Jasc's Paint Shop Pro (PSP) has gained a widespread cult following, because it matches nearly all of Photoshop's capabilities at a fraction of the cost: $99 from the vendor's Web site, cheaper in stores, and $49 if you upgrade from a previous version. Although PSP's price has risen over the years, it's still a comparative bargain. And, best of all, it works with most of the third-party plug-ins developed for Photoshop. Version 6.02 runs on various Windows operating systems, and Muska and Lipman Publishing's $39.99 book Paint Shop Pro 6 Power! (ISBN 0-9662889-2-0) provides lots of usage suggestions.

A less-well-known but perhaps even more capable Photoshop alternative is Digital Light & Color's Picture Window 2.5. "Serious software for serious photographers," claims the manufacturer's Web site, and I agree that Picture Window's intuitive user interface belies its powerful feature set. Version 2.5, which also runs under Windows, comes in $49.95 Standard and $89.95 Pro versions. Pro supports 16-bit, black-and-white and 48-bit, color images; compositing with multipoint alignment; and color-correction-transformation capability. Check out all the free, downloadable documentation and photo utilities on the vendor's Web site.

Jasc Software, 1-612-930-9800, www.jasc.com.

Muska and Lipman Publishing, 1-513-924-9300, www.muskalipman.com.

Digital Light & Color,1-617-489-8858, www.dl-c.com.

-by Brian Dipert