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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Jasc Paint Shop Pro. This tool had the useful half of Illustrator's features and the useful half of Photoshop's, it was blazing fast, and it combined them in a single program so you could mix vector and raster layers. This made it absolutely perfect for web-targeted graphics work. It was the first software I legally bought because it was so good and still affordable (a fraction of the price of Adobe's stuff - something like $200 if i recall correctly).

Corel bought it and turned it into a bloated mess of a photo management tool. IMO they should've just killed Draw and rebranded Paint Shop Pro as the new Draw, it was that much better.

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I still use Paint Shop Pro 6.0 every single day. It runs flawlessly in Windows 7 if you set compatability mode on the EXE to "Windows 2000".

Version 6 was the last good version before Corel muddled up the interface and made it bloated. I can still do some things in 2 clicks that my coworker needs 5-15 clicks to get done in Photoshop. It surprises me to know some things are still so "complicated" in photoshop, just by how many clicks/steps are needed. I'm sure PSP 6 is borderline abandonware at this point, released 16 years ago in 2000! I upped the full version here (15mb): http://www.filedropper.com/psp6

was there a mac version?

Sadly no.

Can I ask a question: is there a way to run a Windows container on Mac just to run such programs?

Rather than a full Windows VM on whatever?

Wine

Wine! For older programs it works especially well. I've had a legal copy of Photoshop 7.0 for Windows since middle school and I have been running it without any problems since then.

Thanks! I just tried it and it works fantastically on my Win10 :-)

It sounds to me like you're describing Affinity Designer - you might want to check it out if you haven't already. It's relatively very cheap and one of the few pieces of software that I use daily that I am very happy paying the list price for!

I vaguely remember having Jasc installed as a kid and it was indeed great!

Affinity Designer is really great for vector graphics, and exporting to raster. Super fast. Super easy to learn.

Their developers are very active. They have a beta available to owners. I've encountered a few minor bugs in their App Store version, downloaded the beta, and noticed it was fixed.

link (also in the Mac app store)

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/

I think Paint.Net is probably the closest current tool to PSP.

Second this! I loved PSP and used it daily. When I lost the binary I hunted around for a replacement for ages and finally settled on Paint.NET. It's not as good but works well enough.

I still have a working copy of PSP 7.04 on my Windows 10 machine and it's still my goto tool for tweaking images.

My wife also has PSP 7 on her Windows 10 machine, and now after reading this thread, I'm going to install it on mine too. It really is quite useful.

That’s awesome. I’m not a fan of Windows, but it’s really cool that it still can run fifteen years old software.

I had a very similar love for Macromedia Fireworks.

Somehow Fireworks is still clinging to life and largely unchanged from the Macromedia days I think. I still find it ridiculously useful for web and mockups.

http://www.adobe.com/products/fireworks.html

i maintain that love, and continue installing mx2004 on things

I still use it on Ubuntu, with Wine. It runs almost flawlessly and it's so much better than all the image editing tools out there (most are crap, Gimp is too bloated).

I still use it; version 7. It's not great but it gets the job done, and I can make perfect good "programmer art".

I remember using it for hand-editing mpeg files. (Using probably Animation Shop Pro), but it was a really wonderful tool.

What's your opinion on Krita?

Isn't Krita more for drawing?

It has come a long way. It's pretty much a jack of all trades... master of drawing.

What a blast from the past. I loved PSP!

As others said, I'm using PSP 7.04; I think it's the last non-corel-bloated version. Loads fast and gets the job done.

I still much preferred Photoshop, but PSP was a pretty great alternative. I agree that Draw didn't really compare, but WordPerfect is pretty great.

Ulead Photoimpact was very good like this too.

Eventually Corel bought it and now they sold it off again to some other company.

Used this in the 90's as my go-to image editor. PSP could open any image format you threw at it.

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