Paint Shop Pro is a photo/drawing editing program comparable to Photoshop, etc., but for a fraction of the price. I've been using various versions of it for many years at work, at home, and for charities I work with.
It has the features you'd expect to find in any drawing program: you can select a paintbrush and draw lines, fill in large areas with a selected color, type text, and manipulate the color of individual pixels in an image if you like. They have a "clone brush" that lets you copy from one part of an image over another part, which is really handy for removing objects from a picture and replacing them with a background that is copied from other parts of the background. There are a number of ways to define a "selection" that you can then copy and paste. You can select by drawing a box or circle around an area, you can draw an outline of any irregular shape, or you can have it automatically select areas with similar color. And you can combine these things: I often use "similar color" to get a first-try outline, and then use other tools to fix up the edges where it didn't get it quite right. Once you've defined a selection, you can copy or move it to elsewhere in the image or in a different image. (My mother met her present husband when they were both in their 80s, but she got me to paste a picture of her in her 20s into a picture with him in his 20s. I think she wants to use it to confuse their friends.) Oh, and there are a bunch of tools to clean up flawed photos, like removing scratches and the flash red-eye effect. There are tools to gloss over human imperfections, like even out skin tones, cover pimples, etc. I've never gotten these to work effectively, but then I haven't spent a lot of time with them. Maybe there's just a trick to it.
At work I regularly import files produced with Photoshop by our clients and while I occasionally get messages about "feature not supported", I've never figured out just what feature the Photoshop file had that is not supported, and I've been able to use and manipulate Photoshop files with no problem.
They come out with a new version every year or so, but there's really little change from year to year. They keep adding new features that seem to be basically less efficient ways to do what the old features did. I think this is basically that they want you to give them money for a new version, but the product is pretty complete by now, it's not clear what useful features one might add, so they add useless junk. Don't get me wrong, it's an excellent product. But they keep adding useless junk just so they can say that they've added new features. Oh, every now and then there's something handy amidst the useless junk.
The main reason to buy a new version is because the old versions don't necessarily work with newer versions of Windows. Like I bought X9 because for reasons I couldn't figure out, my X7 quit working with Windows 10. When I first bought my current computer it came with Windows 10. I installed X7 and I had to download an upgrade from Corel for it to work, but then it worked fine for a year. Then suddenly it just stopped working. Baffled me. Corel's web site says X7 doesn't support Windows 10. So I bought X9 and it works fine. Weird, but whatever. I'm not going to agonize over a hundred bucks.
vandros
Mark
WillyRay