
Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro - ian_lotinsky
https://ianlotinsky.wordpress.com/2018/07/29/thank-you-robert-voit-creator-of-jasc-paint-shop-pro/
======
stupidcar
While Paint Shop Pro 6 is the most beloved version, PSP 7 and (particularly)
8, took the software in a very interesting direction. I remain convinced that
this directly lead to Corel acquiring it with the unstated but definite
intention of crippling it.

See, 6 and below were fairly traditional raster-based editors. But starting in
7, and with substantial improvements in 8, PSP introduced the concept of
raster _and_ vector editing capabilities, in the same document. You could
create raster layers, and do traditional drawing and filtering, and you could
also create vector layers, where you could draw shapes and paths which would
remain editable and would be rasterised on the fly.

It took a while to get your head around this capability, but once you did, it
was incredibly powerful, especially for the time period we're talking about.
Coupled with the rate at which its general raster editing capabilities were
improving, I suspect Corel feared not just that PSP was becoming a more
serious competitor in the raster space, but that it would undermine the market
for CorelDraw, and threaten the whole model of selling separate vector and
raster editors.

In the past few years, mixed paradigm vector/raster editors like Sketch have
become more common. But download a copy of PSP 8 and you'll see that Jasc got
there years before the rest of the industry, to such an extent it meant PSP
had to be killed.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
> it was incredibly powerful, especially for the time period we're talking
> about

Fireworks was also doing this around the same time but seems to have been
completely been forgotten because of Photoshops dominance.

~~~
gfodor
Yep, it still is puzzling why Fireworks never got the recognition it deserved
-- the amount of unnecessary suffering UI designers went through for 10 years
they could have avoided by just switching tools is mind boggling.

~~~
ssharp
I don't think it ever got enough recognition for handling UI designs and
everyone just gravitated towards Photoshop or Illustrator.

I think its heyday was when HTML table layouts were still how you had to
layout websites and it's slicing capabilities were really convenient. I
suspect that was the killer feature for a lot of people but once CSS layouts
took over, Fireworks really fell out of favor and Adobe never bothered to
reposition it as a UI tool.

I still use it to this day for my limited editing/mockup needs. The new
workflow seems to be mockup tool (like Balsamiq) -> Photoshop design ->
HTML/CSS, but for my needs, I can get reasonably close enough in both layout
and design in Fireworks just do Fireworks -> HTML/CSS.

I don't know if a tool that is close enough to Fireworks to be a good
replacement has come around, but I know it's definitely not Photoshop, which I
find far too complicated for the basic tasks I need.

~~~
rzzzt
Macaw felt close to Fireworks, but is now sadly discontinued (although one can
play around with the last released version):
[http://macaw.co/](http://macaw.co/)

~~~
deathtrader666
Macaw is now Invision Studio -
[http://macaw.co/invision/](http://macaw.co/invision/)

------
teh_klev
I still have my copy of PSP 7 (from circa 2001). It's still (for my rather
modest needs) my go-to image editor to this day yet.

Apropos nice letters and communications from founders of software companies
such as JASC, the hosting company I worked for used many of Persits
Software's[0] components on our Windows/IIS servers.

Every now and again I'd need to clarify some technical thing with them that
wasn't in their documentation and every time I'd get a reply within 4-8 hours
directly from Peter the founder of Persits. I didn't even need to supply a
license number or proof of purchase, it was just straightforward good old
fashioned support and customer service. What was also nice about them as well
was that they never fleeced you for "upgrades", you bought a lifetime license
and that was it.

[0]: [http://www.persits.com/index.html](http://www.persits.com/index.html)

~~~
nailer
Man PSP 5 was fantastic. Learning photo manipulation on PSP, and comparing it
to the slow, laggy, unintuitive mess that Photoshop seemed to be, I'm still
not convinced that Adobe products actually work to this day. Obviously other
people have better experiences with Adobe, but I also suspect they're more
tolerant to slower UIs.

~~~
PeterMikhailov
All of the anti counterfeiting US currency code in PS probably slows it down.

~~~
mark-r
The same code is in PSP, and it only slows down specific operations.

------
zokier
PSP is imho the prime example of how piratism hurts software industry. The
problem was not so much that PSP was pirated, but that _Photoshop_ was
pirated. Most people did not need Photoshop, and would have been happy PSP
users. But if Photoshop was "free" then it is natural that people gravitated
towards the "industry-standard" "professional" tool.

Piratism hurts small low-cost hobbyist software most by dislocating them with
free professional juggernaut tools.

~~~
Patrick_Devine
What's your take on big companies contributing and/or running open source/free
software? Doesn't that also dislocate small low-cost hobbyist software?

~~~
zokier
Well I'm not a fan of "open core" products, for not all too dissimilar
reasons. But I'll admit the situation with open source and commercial actors
is fair bit more complicated, with no easy answers (unless you are Stallman)

------
StavrosK
PSP was one of those programs (along with Winamp) that are the hallmarks of
the golden age of user experience for me. They had _a lot of functionality_
but were very lean, a joy to use and reasonably priced. I miss the days when
you didn't need a 100 MB (relatively speaking) package just to show a screen.

~~~
modzu
for offline music collections, winamp is _still_ the best player on windows!

~~~
l_t
If you haven't seen it, check out foobar2000 [1]. It was created by the same
dude that made the original Winamp (which is now owned by Yahoo, IIRC).

[1]: [https://www.foobar2000.org/](https://www.foobar2000.org/)

~~~
rhymenoceros
According to WinAmp folklore, he was a contractor for WinAmp 3 skins and not
necessarily a full-time dev:
[http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118192](http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118192)

You might be thinking of Justin Frankel:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel)

The connection is still kind of cool though!

~~~
l_t
Ah, thanks for the correction. I remember being told they had the same
creator; that's what got me interested in foobar2000 in the first place, years
ago.

------
busterarm
Paint Shop Pro 5 (and later 6 & 7) is still to this day one of my favorite
pieces of software (no, I'm not still using it) and one of the first things in
the PC era that I didn't pirate.

It was largely responsible for my early development as a web designer and
later developer. I still remember it being incredibly intuitive and fun to
use. I probably logged thousands of hours inside of that application.

~~~
and0
My copy of PSP 5 came with my computer, and may have been my gateway into
graphic design.

I'd still take Photoshop over it, but it was a surprisingly solid alternative.

------
drakonka
Paint Shop Pro (I think 6) was my first ever non-Paint graphics editing
program. I spotted it at a dollar store in Alabama, soon after moving to the
US and getting our first computer. At the time I wanted to become a web
designer.

I fricking loved Paint Shop Pro. As a teenager I made some websites for local
bands and record companies. I was at the stage where you'd create one fancy
image and then slice it into website parts to position them as backgrounds on
the page and layer the textual elements over them. Paint Shop Pro was a joy to
me as the maker of these cheesy band website layouts that I'd then slice up.

------
bondolo
I have a similar story about Brad Templeton's C64 Assembler. It was the first
development tool I ever bought and, at the time, very expensive for me as a
high school student. I later came to claim that I would always pay for any
software that I used for more time than it would have taken me to earn the
money to buy it. Quickly that became everything I used as my earnings were a
lot better.

I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to thank Brad for C64 Assembler
and the role it had in forming some of my ethics around fair-use and paying
for intellectual property.

------
SmellyGeekBoy
"You are on day 1,439 of your 30-day trial"

~~~
thetrumanshow
Ha, right, no upgrade needed in that version... but eventually I did upgrade
and recommend it to others, due to the generosity of the honor system they put
in place in that version. Loved the software. Wait, maybe that was Winzip.
Both were great.

~~~
Chronos309
Around day 2,000 is when the guilt kicked in for me.

------
callumprentice
Fascinating article here about Robert -
[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxa53/how-an-
air...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxa53/how-an-airline-
pilot-took-on-adobe-photoshopand-nearly-won)

TIL: JASC stood for Jets and Software Company..

Adding my name to the list of people who loved Paint Shop Pro and had several
amazing interactions with the company.

~~~
pieterr
Primarily the Name JASC was short for “Just Another Software Company” but
later it was changed to “Jets and Software Company”.

[1] [https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/pages/old-
brands/jasc/](https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/pages/old-brands/jasc/)

~~~
nasredin
JASC also made "Animation Shop", a GIF editor.

It won't open modern x264 files, but works fine with uncompressed video.

And the GIF format just won't die thanks to hipsters.

Thank you JASC and hipsters!

------
ariehkovler
Paint Shop Pro was the best.

I was not as honest as the author of this article. I didn't buy Paint Shop Pro
and I didn't write to its creator. I got a free trial on a cover-disk of some
PC magazine and managed to extend the trial indefinitely via some hack or
other.

Until then my only image editing tool was Microsoft Paint(brush), and PSP was
a whole new world. Layers, clone tools, airbrushing. It was amazing. I was one
of the few kids in my school who could edit images like that -- there were a
couple who had Photoshop because their parents did design or photography.

Then at some point they clamped down on dodgy users, but by then Adobe had old
versions of Photoshop out for free and eventually the GIMP made it to Windows.

------
zokier
> It was no surprise to me years later to learn that JASC was acquired by
> Corel. Your life’s hard work, honesty, and kindness rewarded you, and I
> couldn’t have been happier for you.

Rewarded maybe financially, but it must have been a bittersweet moment
considering that PSP probably had already peaked at that point and definitely
did not prosper under new ownership.

------
DanielleMolloy
PSP7 was a favorite piece of software that I had been using for years when
still mainly on Windows systems. It was useful and intuitive when having to
make changes to plenty of raster images, or when doing pixel graphics;
creating alpha transparent sections, clean ups, and so on. I also used
Paint.NET a lot for batch edits.

It still seems a bit difficult to find a replacement for these two on macOS
and Linux. Intuitive interfaces focusing on primary image editing functions
and stable output to various formats are probably what is missing for non-
professional users like me.

GIMP seems like a great project but has a terrible overblown UI. I tried
Photoshop / Illustrator for a year as you get the CS4-subscription at a low
price from my university. A few features, e.g. how embedded images were
handled are nice, but the software is massive and the interface is so weirdly
complex that I had to search for guides for the simplest tasks (who is
profiting from having to "study" CS4...?). With PSP7, which is decently
powerful I went through a couple of tutorials and was set up for years. Also,
I had spent half an hour to deactivate all the spyware that comes with CS4,
this is a no-go.

You can read that I am just really ignorant about modern graphics editing
workflows. I'm not a graphics professional, but need to make "production
level" graphics every few months. I need relatively technical vector
illustrations (e.g. of experiment flows, NN models) and clean figures of
scientific results (raster) in a visualization-heavy field.

For vector graphics I now really like Inkscape with its SVG basis. I still go
back to Dia a lot though whenever the illustration fits their limited (but
sufficient) scope. Both can be used on Linux and macOS.

Still searching for a powerful but plain & simple (and stable!) raster
graphics editor though. Currently Krita looks nice, but it is clearly in
development stage. Would pay for either Acorn or Pixelmator if I wasn't
concerned that they will also start emulating the UI of Photoshop in the
future.

~~~
mynewtb
> GIMP seems like a great project but has a terrible overblown UI

Have you tried the new 2.10 and the single window mode?

~~~
Drdrdrq
I haven't, but I have another bone to pick with its authors. They lost
credibility in my eyes with the whole Save/Export debacle. Sure, I use a
plugin now that changes behaviour so I can save to PNG (who in the world uses
xcf directly anyway?), but it's a pain to install everywhere, and I'm afraid
it will stop working one day. I really wish they listened to their longtime
users.

------
CiPHPerCoder
I apologize if this an insensitive question, but a Google search wasn't very
enlightening.

Did Robert Voit die, or was this prompted solely by the author's reminiscence?

~~~
throwawayxrvv
He's alive and lives in peaceful Scottsdale, Arizona.

------
mark-r
There's a benefit to starting out as an airline pilot.

Decision making is critical for a pilot, in the worst case hesitation can mean
death. Robert Voit was a master at taking in relevant information, making a
decision, and moving on. That's an essential skill for a good business leader.

~~~
patrickg_zill
OODA Loop:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop)

------
bbernard
Everybody here is talking about PSP 5.0+.

But for me, the best version _ever_ was 3.0. I was able to draw pretty
impressive diagrams at the pixel level, without any problem.

In subsequent versions, they modified the zoom tool, the GUI and the brushes,
so it was quite harder to do the same thing.

~~~
kmeade
I stopped upgrading at version 4.14, in 1997. I think version 5 added layers
and some other complexities that I just didn't care to deal with.

Eventually, I added Gimp to my "arsenal" for occasional complex work, but that
20 year old Paintshop Pro is still my daily driver for quick graphics stuff.
Runs fine on Windows 10.

Amazing piece of software and Minnesota!

~~~
mark-r
Version 5 was also the first one that forced you to pay after the trial period
was over. Did that have anything to do with your decision?

~~~
kmeade
No, I was using a paid for version.

I just noticed you can buy a brand-new copy of Paintshop Pro for $48 (cheap!)
at [https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-
pro/stand...](https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-
pro/standard/) I'm thinking about it.

~~~
mark-r
It occasionally goes on sale for even cheaper. Plus you can find it bundled
for free sometimes, e.g. with a Panasonic camera lens:
[https://www.adorama.com/ipc2517mnk.html](https://www.adorama.com/ipc2517mnk.html)

------
duggan
Animation Shop, PSP's sibling application for creating animations, is
something I still keep on a VM for making highly customized gifs - timing for
frames, pixel modification, compression, etc.

Corel had made it available via Jasc's FTP server for free a number of years
back when I went looking for it again.

I check every now and then, but I've never found anything nearly as useful.
Other software seems to have a much reduced feature set, be extremely slow or
unstable, and maddeningly, not offer any control over individual frames.

It's possible there's something in the Adobe suite, but I (alone, of seemingly
everyone on the Internet) never pirated Photoshop, and wasn't willing to fork
out the asking price.

------
uberman
PSP was fantastic. I stopped using it when Corel acquired it though.

------
crtasm
My dad came home from work one day and handed me a floppy disk from one of his
colleagues. I suddenly had my hands on my first decent image editor _and_ my
first digital image of a naked woman.

Never did find out if he knew about the latter.

------
Zaskoda
Paint Shop Pro 6 was far better than the version of Photoshop at the time IF
you were a Web dev. While Photoshop did a better job of handling really big
photos for print, PSP had the best tools for generating web-ready images.

------
cJ0th
Back then I was still going to school and thus didn't have much money. And so
it was always a joy when a new version of psp came out so that I could us an
evaluation copy for another 30 days :D

edit: the article states simple re-installation was enough to reset the
evaluation? I thought I tried that. Maybe it changed with later versions?

------
simonebrunozzi
I loved, loved, loved Paint Shop Pro. I think my all-time favorite version was
7. Back then (2003-2008) I used to do a lot of web design, and I would do all
the graphics with Flash and PSP. I tried Photoshop 2-3 times during these
years, and was always surprised to see how terrible the UX was in comparison
with PSP.

Good memories.

------
subir
Jasc PSP 5 was the first full-blown image editor I ever used. Those were the
days when I was taking baby steps with web design. Absolutely loved the no-
nonsense, workflow. Not to mention, it seemed to pack every feature imaginable
in a small, cheap package!

------
ThomW
I love PSP. It was one of the few applications worth the money the author
charged for it. Up until recently I was using PSP5 for all of my taster image
editing, but I reinstalled my OS drive and I don’t know where I stashed my
setup.exe for it and the much-needed patch. Great stuff.

------
ajenner
I'm another person who regularly uses PSP (version 4 in my case) for most of
my day to day bitmap editing tasks - it's fast, stable and has most of the
features I need so I've never felt the need to upgrade!

------
pbourke
Is there a descendent-in-spirit of PSP in active development nowadays?

~~~
teh_klev
Yes, PSP is still in development:

[https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-
pro/](https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-pro/)

------
techload
PSP was and still is amazing. And while we are down the memories lane, one
thing that strikes me as incredible was running Ventura Publisher (DOS) with
that graphic UI on a 286.

------
madengr
Xylon looks fun to play. I miss old and simple computer games.

~~~
ian_lotinsky
Thanks! We gave up on it because the game was too easy and RSD Game-Maker--not
to be confused with YoYo Games GameMaker--wasn't sophisticated enough to build
a real game. It was a heck of a lot of fun to use though.

------
fhj
PSP was the only program I knew about that showed images inside a folder in
the folder's thumbnail. This was a very time-saving feature!

------
dchester195
Are you going to release Xylon for people to play?

~~~
ian_lotinsky
The video captures the entire game. Still want a copy? ;)

------
Theodores
My copy was legit, paid for by work. I made weather icons with it in 8 bit
colour with transparency - think of animated GIF's. The hardware was a Compaq
Deskpro with 2Mb of video RAM. I was a mere techie with 8 bit home computing
experience, not a trained graphic artist.

My employers were not the sort to have pirated software on the premises,
however, the process if getting a purchase order for £30 software rather than
£10000 software seemed almost more awkward.

My colleagues who did have the £40K SGI workstations with the £10K+ Parallax
Matador software and giant Wacom tablets just did not have the tools needed to
make the all important weather icons. This was in the days before maps had
been sorted out so they mostly drew artistic interpretations of maps, with
limited knowledge of geography - quite embarrassing really. But, you know,
gotta work as a team.

The icons had to be made as sprites and only a certain amount of RAM was
available, I think they also had to align on some type of kilobyte boundaries
too. Needless to say JASC Paintshop Pro was the perfect tool for the job.

I did have access to Photoshop which actually came full version with a
scanner. My colleagues in graphics saw Photoshop as a cut down PC tool, not
really professional at all. So I could not get to meet with them in the middle
whereby they would be able to do the icons and somehow get them into the
formats needed for broadcast. That thought was tantamount to asking them to
sweep the streets and empty the bins - below them.

Maybe I stuck with PSP longer than I should have done as I did have a bit of a
learning curve a few years later when Photoshop became the vital tool for part
of a job I moved on to. Due to consolidation in TV and nobody being able to
pay £100K for a seat for graphic artists my colleagues also had to move on
from their tools of choice. They chose to be dinosaurs, to be usurped by kids
with dirt cheap tools. Sad really. So many games of status and other delusions
made up the reality of working in broadcast television at that time, the toys
being part of that.

The funniest thing I found was the giant Wacom tablet gorilla arm problem. If
you were a proper graphic designer then you had to have the biggest of huge
Wacom tablets, great in principle except the action is all in the wrist. They
would be dragging their elbows to the far corners of the desk to get to a
palette colour or menu item.

Most of my PSP work was done with a mouse and 1280 x 1024 15" CRT monitor.
However I did get a lucky break when learning Photoshop as I had a small Wacom
Tablet and an excellent mentor in a former graphic designer that just barked
hotkeys at me. I did what he wanted done in doubleplusgood time, studio crew
of twenty waiting... Creating masks and other image corrections were done in
the way that bluescreen video is done, dealing with the whole image and doing
so very quickly. Only years later did I understand what some of those toolbox
icons were or what the hotkeys corresponded to in the menus.

Sometimes it pains me to see today's graphic artists spending all day doing
basic artwork stuff where they are manually deleting pixels and drawing around
things, headphones plugged in, no knowledge of hotkeys known. Despite being
retired the lessons that my mentors taught me come back to haunt me and I do a
little bit of teaching.

PSP was the opening for me to not be just a mere techie but to cross that
imaginary line into doing creative work. There is no point being adamant that
you are just an artist and don't do tech stuff. It is also cowardly to be a
techie and never do creative artwork stuff. For me PSP enabled me to let go of
the handrails and become a creative techie.

~~~
mprev
Thanks for sharing that. I worked in broadcast tv briefly and remember fondly
the strange world of tooling.

------
Markoff
the article would have more credibility if author would not try to promote his
game in it

~~~
ian_lotinsky
Hi Markoff!

I agree with your sentiment, but I'm not promoting my game in the least. It
was created back in the mid-90s, never was released to the public, and never
will be. Robert expressed that he looked forward to playing the games we made
with PSP, and we never shipped a game he could see. The video captures the
entire gameplay simply to show him what we were up to as kids as a part of our
thank you.

I hope this clarifies things for you.

Thanks,

Ian

