Do you want to create an artistic version of your photo? How about a program that allows you to undo individual steps that you applied on the image without affecting all other steps?

Paint Shop Pro 9 introduces two special effects filters, the Displacement Map and the Radial Blur. The Displacement Map is a tool for creating 2D and 3D surface distortions while the Radial Blur is used for creating blur effects including spin, twist and zoom. With the Print Layout dialog, you will be able to add freeform text captions and title to your photo layouts using the Text Options. The new Text tool options allow you to create vertical text and render small font sizes. For polygons and star shapes, you can use the new Symmetric Shape tool that’s customizable.

Paint Shop Pro introduces another tool for digital camera users, the Info palette. This palette is designed to show the EXIF data that digital cameras automatically store with their images. Examples of which are aperture and exposure. Paint Shop Pro 9 contains features to support unprocessed raw sensor data that are captured by advanced cameras. It also allows you to set customized white balance and exposure, as well as sharpening of settings for import.

You can now easily undo any individual editing step in a document’s history through the use of the Powerful Selective Undo. The History palette lists all the commands that you applied on the image. You can undo specific steps without affecting subsequent actions.

The latest Paint Shop Pro features new enhanced filters. It has Digital Camera Noise Removal, which not only scans photos it also eliminates image noise introduced at the sensor while intelligently preserving image textures. Its Chromatic Aberration Removal removes undesirable coloured glow around images caused by digital cameras. It contains a Fill Flash Filter that corrects the underexposure of shadows and Backlighting Filter compensates for overexposed areas.

Not only does this software handle existing photos, it can also create images from scratch in both bitmap and vector format. It also has Rectangle and Oval tools. The Pen tool in this version is a lot simpler.

The new Art Media tool is a realistic art-based functionality that contains tools including Oil Brush, Palette Knife, Chalk, Pastel, Crayons, Colored Pencil and Marker. This tool features a traditional-style Mixer that’s just like those traditional artist’s tools. You can add, mix and sample your paint on an off-canvas area using the new dockable palette. You can also convert photos to an artistic version by setting the colour to Trace, it automatically samples the underlying colour.

However, working with this software requires longer time, but you can be assured of great results. It can convert average photos to outstanding shots with eye-popping quality and clarity.