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Comment by chao- | Hacker News Reader

As an adamant aficionado of PSP over Photoshop, I never forgave Corel for buying Jasc and turning PSP into just another CorelDRAW. If I had wanted CorelDRAW, I would have purchased CorelDRAW. I did not. I wanted Paintshop Pro, and I had it, for a time.

A decade and a half later, though, my feelings are mostly numb.

Edit: Why did I like PSP over PS? At the time, PSP had better support for my tablet, and had hotkeys that made more intuitive sense for me. I did use PS for a while, sparingly from 2010 to 2015. In the long run, I don't do art anymore, and mostly just web design, for which my company uses Figma anyway. Occasionally we might contact something from a UX designer who uses Sketch, but we just import it into Figma anyway. Photoshop might as well not exist as far as I am concerned.

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PSP was one of the few products that made Windows productive. It loaded quickly, worked smoothly, and the UI was elegant in a way that the PS UI still isn't.

Many things about PS still irritate users in a "That's just wrong, stupid, and annoyingly poorly thought out, and why do you keep adding pointless new features instead of fixing this?" kind of a way. [1]

PSP didn't do as much, but a lot of what it did do was more transparent and effortless.

When Corel bought it, they turned it into PSP Pro X Plus Special Edition Platinum Millennium Marketing Bullshit Edition. All kinds of cruft appeared, some of it was entertaining, very little of it was useful, none of it was elegant or beautiful.

[1] PSP had a "Create new from clipboard" option which created a new image from the clipboard with a single click. Boom. Done. In PS you have to select a new placeholder from a list of all other possible sizes, possibly after some scrolling and selecting, and then manually paste the image into the document. And now you have an image layer and a background layer, which is often not what you want.

> PSP had a "Create new from clipboard" option

Since forever (probably since PS 2.4 or so) choosing "New Document" in Photoshop defaults to the size of the document on the clipboard. My workflow is: Copy in one app > Switch to PS > CMD + N > Hit Enter > CMD + V

Still not convenient. I prefer to use mspaint for pasting clipboard images and screenshots just to avoid all unnecessary steps.

Not convenient? It takes less about 1 second for a task that is usually not performed in a repeated sequence.

You might be over optimising your time.

This is still Photoshop (today) requiring more clicks that PSP required in the 1990s for the same task. This was true for many tasks at the time.

It's no clicks in PS. Ctrl-N, <enter>, Ctrl-V.

This is more efficient then having to switch to the mouse.

Another piece of software that I thought made Windows productive in the 90s was Microsoft Publisher.

We got this bundled with...something? Maybe a printer? And I used it a lot for schoolwork. It was clean, neat and powerful. You could use it to layout a page really easily.

At some point they stopped selling it to normal people and brought out Microsoft Home Publishing instead. And of course it was complete crap by comparison.

I have since discovered that Adobe Illustrator is better than both.

Adobe indesign is a direct competitor to publisher. I still love publisher.

One of the consequences of the Microsoft Office hegemony was that it mostly destroyed the market for apps whose functions could be performed, however awkwardly, by Office programs like Word.

Sure you can use InDesign but that’s expensive overkill for a lot of desktop publishing.

I thought Home Publishing was just a bundle of Publisher and Works? That seems to be what searches turn up. They truly killed Works (which was crap), but Publisher still exists in zombie form.

Office 365 includes Publisher as do most Office SKUs. Office 365 Home in the Windows Store will install Publisher by default today, but for a long time with Office you had to do a custom install to install it, which is partly why a lot of people thought Publisher was dead because it didn't install by default.

That said, Publisher does feel like a zombie compared to the excitement it had in the 90s. I've wondered if that's because we aren't printing as much today (and there's basically no competition in the "desktop publishing" space at all), or if it's just how much of its development resources merged (back) to Word since the 90s.

I used to use paintshop pro when it was basically just an image viewer / converter, it was interesting to see it turn into a paint program in its own right.

Interesting; I fully agree overall that PhotoShop interface is counter-intuitive and serves legacy rather than UI design.

But the specific example doesn't work the same way for me: I hit Ctrl-N, and the size of image in my clipboard is the default pre-populated, pre-selected size (verified now in PS 6 and whatever current PS CC is); then I click Ctrl-V. So it's not a "Single click", but it's two keyboard shortcuts, my pinkie never leaves Ctrl button, so it's preferred for me to a mouse click anyway ️

But still, PSP did it better, with fewer clicks, that long ago.

I loved PSP, and used it for years. Much better than Photoshop for the use I had (mostly website design).

>PSP was one of the few products that made Windows productive. It loaded quickly, worked smoothly, and the UI was elegant in a way that the PS UI still isn't.

The days of computer with extremely slow HDD, PSP allow me to quickly finish some photo editing and offer more features than most users would ever need. All while PS would still be loading.

Another important point was PSP was way cheaper, and Shareware. I don't even remember any students using PS actually bought it themselves.

I used PSP early on in the 90s because it was cheap and fast. It was one of my favorite pieces of software for a long time in the Windows 9x days. For the longest time there were things I could do easily in PSP that I found difficult to accomplish in PS. Unfortunately, PSP never expanded across platforms and free or native solutions eventually took its place for me. I never used it after Jasc was bought, but have fond memories of bringing home PSP 5.

I miss psp too. Photoshop doesn’t click with and has (had?) unbearable load times. We had it back when I worked for a small typography around 20 years ago and it was real job-grade boring.

Recently I found an editor that resembles psp feel: https://pixlr.com/editor/ (flash). I’m not affiliated with it in any way, just using it to crop my weekly memes.

I will never be able to afford Photoshop.

I have recently bought Affinity Photo and Designer simply because it doesn't have a subscription model, but I really miss Jasc PSP.

> I will never be able to afford Photoshop

Seriously? It’s $10/month on the Photography Plan, and you get Lightroom and some online storage in the same bundle as well:

    https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html

I get that $120/year is significant, but it doesn’t take much payback in terms of time saved to make it worthwhile. If you can’t squeeze $120/year of use value out of Photoshop and Lightroom, you probably don’t do enough image editing and photography to make any photo app worth buying.

Well, if I had subscribed to PS back then I would have spent like $500 by now.

I just don't use it nearly enough to justify paying a subscription. I might not even use it for months at a time.

Affinity cost me like $50, once. The mere comfort of just being able to use it whenever you need it is worth that money to me.

$500 is still less than the one-time price of Photoshop back when it was sold in boxes. Photoshop is well worth $120/year if you're able to use a big enough fraction of its power.

One way to look at it, then, is that you don't use enough of what Photoshop can do to be worth it, so you can stick with whatever simpler tool you prefer and save the money. Another option, though, is to realize that there's a lot of power there to be had, and it's worth spending the time to learn to harness it.

I put it that way because I keep coming across people who talk about their favorite image editor as "just as good as Photoshop" for their purposes while they clearly have no idea what all Photoshop can do. Here's a tutorial I did for Photoshop once that probably can be done only in Photoshop:

    https://photo.stackexchange.com/a/57233/4141

Now, I don't expect you to need to retexture pictures of couches, but I'll bet if you read through that tutorial, you'll be surprised that such things even could be done in off-the-shelf software. Then realize that I'm not even a full-time professional in graphical arts. If I can pull off such tricks, what can a real expert do with it?

By the way, Lightroom was another $120 or so for the initial license when it was last sold in boxes.

Then there's all the upgrades, which you also now get as part of the subscription.

Your $50 just isn't apples-to-apples.

oh, that brings good memories. I was webdesigner back then (is that still a thing?) and used PSP exclusively.

Never got a hold of PS to this day.

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