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• What's Missing?

  Having heaped all the praise on what is an impressing product offering from JASC, one must temper that as there are some things that are missing from PSP 9.  First off, and I am not sure why, the instructional video’s in PSP 8 are gone.   Secondly, while you can manually build a panorama or stitch together photos as well as creating collages in PSP 9, to do these things effectively requires the use of Photo Album 5. The panorama function in PSP’s Photo Album 5 is absolutely awesome as the 5 photo panorama of the Boise River shows and creating this panorama was as simple as selecting the photos and clicking panorama!
  
  
  
  A few months back, I bought PSP 8 Power Suite Photo Edition which was about the same price as PSP 9 is now, but there were some significant rebates with my final out-of-pocket being around $60.  For that purchase, I got PSP 8, Photo Album 5, Animation Shop 3, and all the Photo Shop Extras (1 & 2).  To buy that same mix today, at retail prices, would be pretty spendy.
  
  The User Guide is okay but you’ll be finding yourself turning to other resources such as third party books.  There are few tutorials on the JASC website but most of them were written for PSP 8, not 9 as is the 3rd party books but then as I said, this is an incremental upgrade from PSP 8.
  
  One cost effective alternative I can recommend to you is JACS’s new Paint Shop Pro Studio which includes Photo Album 5, standard edition.  Pro Studio is based on PSP 9 but leaves out a few features such as the scripting, screen captures, and a couple of digital camera “fixes” that most would not miss.  While I can highly recommend PSP 9 for the advanced user, Paint Shop Pro Studio provides real value to current users to older versions of PSP in providing most of what PSP 9 offers and includes Photo Album 5 to manage and share your photos and create photo projects along with 2 click burning to CD of those projects.  Paint Shop Pro Studio is available for $39 as an upgrade for previous PSP owners.
  
  Choices!  If you are a member of a Computer User Group, be sure to check out the User Group pricing in the next page.  If you didn't buy PSP 8 and own a previous version of Paint Shop Pro, you should really upgrade NOW as not only is the pricing great, PSP 8 and now PSP 9 is a big leap forward power and functionality.  You own a competitive product such as Photoshop, check ou the next section of this article.  You don't own a product, you need to take a very serious look at Paint Shop Pro 9.
  
  Pricing & Competitive Upgrades
  

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