Goodbye PaintShop Pro

I’ve have used PaintShop Pro for decades, even before Corel took over from Jasc Software. It has been my companion for everything that required graphical work. Game images, web development, ideas. I learned about filters, layers, selections and various other modern editing techniques through PaintShop Pro.

I’m not really a graphics artist per se, but I could usually get things done in PaintShop Pro.

Why did I choose PaintShop Pro and not Adobe Photoshop? It wasn’t really much of conscious choice. Since I knew I wasn’t going to use it professionally, I just chose whatever was cheaper at the time. That quickly painted me into a corner. I got used to the way its many features had to be used, the hotkeys, and all the subtle differences in general. I knew early on that it would probably be difficult to replace it.

PaintShop Pro did have some features that many other graphics programs couldn’t be bothered to have. It had built-in screen capture, something Affinity Photo 2 and GIMP didn’t find important to have – at least not when I checked them out shortly before writing this blog post.

I also used its batch feature a lot for processing all the game images you see in this blog. And those are just the tip of a mountain of game screenshots I have collected for decades now. Several DVD ROM images have been created to hold all these. I’m not even sure why I always saved them aside. I almost never go back and reminisce over my old gaming days anymore. I guess you could call me a screenshot hoarder.

But PaintShop Pro also made me angry at times. Even though I had bought the program, quitting it sometimes showed a dialog box with an advertisement about upgrading to a newer version. There was a check box in the bottom for not showing this dialog box again. It never worked, and I just knew it was never supposed to. No event had ever been bound to it. That frequently pissed me off.

I bought a new PC a few weeks ago, and because of moving on to Windows 11, I decided to refresh the graphics program too. In the meantime, Adobe had been through adversity for making a subscription out of Photoshop, and for their stance on training the AI on the productions of all their users. A lot of YouTube videos had popped up recommending Affinity Photo 2 as a great alternative.

So, I installed a trial version of Affinity Photo 2.

At first I thought it looked really good and had a sensible layout of functions and icons. It didn’t last long before I found something I hated, though. I’ve always liked being able to select part of an image and then paste it into the same image for placing it elsewhere. But even after rasterizing a layer to pixels, pasting a selection just created a completely new layer. In PaintShop Pro pasting it became a floating layer, so it kind of did something similar, but even then it still appeared on the same image for me to move it around.

Affinity Photo 2 absolutely refused to do that, and it was a deal breaker for me. Uninstalled.

Every man to his trade, I thought, and downloaded PaintShop Pro 2023. It had a 30 days trial period and I decided to make use of it before buying. At first I was happy to see my old friend again. They didn’t change a lot in the new version. All the features and hotkeys I knew still worked in the same way. As I closed the program down, it showed a dialog box about 30 days being left of my trial period. Fair enough.

The next day, I used PaintShop Pro to create a featured image for POOLS, a short walking simulator I had just completed. I closed it and starting surfing the internet. Then all of a sudden, a corner message popped up in the bottom corner above the clock and date. It stated that my trial of PaintShop Pro had ended and that I needed to buy the program right now.

WTF!?

I quickly started PaintShop Pro thinking it was some kind of date miscalculation, but as I closed it, it showed the usual dialog box about me having 30 days left of my trial. And then it dawned on me. It was yet another one of Corel’s dark pattern shenanigans. This one pissed me off to such a degree, I decided against buying their program. I absolutely detest dark patterns, and enough is enough.

That meant I had to go search for an alternative. Having discarded Affinity Photo 2, I decided to take a look at GIMP, which has been released under the GNU General Public License and thus is free. I’ve not made my final judgment yet, but I actually like most of what I’ve tried out in it so far. It does things a little differently than PaintShop Pro, but their changes seem to make sense.

I hope it will become my new best graphical friend.

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