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Re: Paintshop and Corel

Martin Brown
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SubjectRe: Paintshop and Corel
FromMartin Brown
Date11/26/2013 10:25 (11/26/2013 09:25)
Message-ID<jOZku.60$Nf1.22@fx02.am4>
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Newsgroupsrec.photo.digital
FollowsMayayana
FollowupsMayayana (4h & 49m)
On 22/11/2013 14:34, Mayayana wrote:

Mayayana
| Corel may indeed have a product called PhotoPaint. But they also have | (or had) a product call Paintshop Photo Pro. I am staring at it in a | box on my bookshelf. I think I paid $25 for it in a Black Friday deal a | few years ago, but never got around to installing it.

Yes, they bought it from the original authors, Jasc, some years ago. They still sell it, but have changed the versions. It's currently PSP X6, rather than just a version number.

Unfortunately they broke it pretty badly in the process.

I can state with certainty that their JPEG codec as used in PSPro8 is broken in terms of badly executed chroma subsampling and a distinctive typo in their quantisation tables. PSPro5 used IJG codec. I don't know when they switched over as I don't have samples of PSP6,7 JPEGs.

If anyone would like to volunteer the 8x8 test pieces to encode are:

http://www.nezumi.demon.co.uk/photo/jpeg/3/b8_sby.bmp and http://www.nezumi.demon.co.uk/photo/jpeg/3/b8_src.bmp

These test pieces test every combination of up to 4 pixels subsampling.

I only need one or the other but at a range of subsamplings especially

2x2 1x1 1x1 (default) 2x2 2x1 2x1 (camera) 1x1 1x1 1x1 (full sampling)

I have PSPro X4 and in some ways that is even worse. It offers an enormous range of chroma subsampling but almost none of them work correctly apart from the default 4x4,2x2,2x2.

I'd be interested in small sample images encoded by other versions of PSPro for reference to determine exactly when the rot set in.

I agree that PSPro5 was a particularly good vintage.

I still use PSP5 for basic editing. It does what I need. I once decided to update to PSP7 but was very disappointed with it. They had stuffed it full of nonsense bloat. (Simply drawing a rectangle had become a complex task, cluttered with choices to use stock backgrounds and such.) So I went back to PSP5.

I'd be interested in the test pieces encoded with PSP 7 if you still have it installed somewhere. I am curious when the rot set in.

-- Regards, Martin Brown (my strange looking email address is valid when unaltered)

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Mayayana (4h & 49m)