Paint Shop Pro 8? Any good?
 

Hi, I'm going to be shooting some content in the near future. Mostly teen/ amateur.
I'm looking to buy a reasonably cheap image manipulation package for getting rid of the odd blemish, wrinkle, etc.
No, I'm not shooting mature content but you know what happens to some girls who spend too much time in the sun.... :winkwink:

Having only tried an evaluation version of PSP 7 with some features disabled, does anyone have enough experience of this software to advise me/ suggest an alternative?

Also, what's the best resolution to shoot at and how many Mpixels should the camera have (currently using 5 Mpixels)?

I know you love these newbie questions so please give me clue.

Cheers.

a free legal alternative photo retouching program would be "The Gimp" , there is a windows version.

get photoshop, it is the best and worth the money

and there is always newsgroups, they have fresh copies of it

As a big PSP nut (too lazy to take on the photoshop learning curve... hard to learn something new when you're so used to something else!!) PSP 6 was a good program. PSP 7 improved on that greatly. PSP 8 was almost a complete rebuild. If you've never used PSP before, you'll probably be ok.

As the others say, Photoshop is the ultimate graphic tool, pricier yes, but more powerful. I still use Paint Shop Pro 7 and like it well enough. If all you are doing is retouching photos, you'll probably like it. There are some auto- built in features to enhance photos that work fairly well (Auto Saturation, Fade Correction, etc). Hit me up on ICQ if you want to chat about it.

Furthermore, I just checked up on pricing for you.

Paint Shop Pro 8 is $84 Download, $94 Boxed (I went the box route, now I'm a dealer :) )

As for Photoshop... v CS is $649 Retail. That alone defeats your quest for "reasonably cheap".

I'll help you with what I can learning your way thru paint shop pro.

My "I'm a computer dealer" plug for the week :thumbsup