Pay particular attention to the controls for mesh quality; one of the best features I've found in Paint Shop Pro is the quick "sliders" that allow me to quickly change particular settings. I can use the standard up and down arrows to change the setting by one step at a time, or I can click on the larger down arrow and be presented with a horizontal bar that allows me to very quickly move from one end of the spectrum to the other. The control isn't as fine, but the speed is quite welcome when you don't need precise control, especially since you can always fine tune things with the standard one step at a time option.

Once you're finished using a tool, you can accept all of your changes by clicking on the blue check mark on the tool bar, or you can undo all of them at once by choosing the big red X. This makes it safer to play around and try all of the different options without having to worry about ruining a photo. The selective undo system is also very nice.

There's a small History palette at the bottom right corner of the screen that lists each action as soon as you take it, whether that's painting, erasing, moving, or warping a particular object in your image. Clicking on a particular item in the history will allow you to undo it, undo all items up to that point, or you can select a group of items. If you decide that you really didn't want to undo a particular action, you can still redo it as well, giving you complete control over the digital editing process.

If you need some help finding or using a particular feature, you'll be glad to know that the help system in Jasc's Paint Shop Pro 9 is truly top notch. A sampling of Paint Shop Pro's help system can be found in Figure B.

FIGURE B

Paint Shop Pro's help system is top notch. Click picture for a larger image.

When I needed more information about the screen capture function in Paint Shop Pro 9, the index to the help function quickly took me to the right spot. All of the menu selections I needed to make were carefully laid out, and all of the options for each menu were fully explained.

After just a couple of minutes I learned all the ins and outs of the Screen Capture feature and was able to use it competently. By the way, that feature saved me a lot of time when I was taking the screenshots for this article, since it offered the option to save either the entire desktop or just a particular application window. You'll find the same level of detail and carefully thought out functionality throughtout the entire program.

If you're not quite ready for the complexity of Paint Shop Pro 9, you may want to take a closer look at Paint Shop Pro Studio. It's a relatively new product for Jasc, and is similar to Paint Shop Pro, without some of the more advanced features. Web animation is missing, as well as the ability to create macro "sets" of commands to speed up digital photo processing.

Some of the more advanced art tools like custom shapes and color mixing are also not found in Studio, but that's no great loss for the average consumer-level digital photographer. If you're mainly interested in doing more advanced editing than the simple cropping and red-eye reduction tools in Photo Album 5, but don't need a full graphic-artist level of control and complexity, Studio is a great buy at only $69 for the download edition, a savings of $50 from the $119 download edition of Paint Shop Pro 9.