PhotoFiltre - excellent raster graphics editing tool

About two years ago I embarked upon a quest to find an alternative to Photoshop 6 that was affordable and would allow me to do more than just edit photographs.

This led me to PaintShop Pro 9 which I quite liked but felt that it started up slowly. When PSP X came out about four months later, I upgraded because the upgrade pricing was very reasonable and it was touted as being both much quicker to startup and less resource intensive than PSP 9 (and I was an idiot and opened my wallet without even downloading the trial first!). In practice, its startup was significantly slower and resource usage more intensive... I stayed away from PSP XI, having learned my lesson with the upgrade to X and noted the howls of protest from PSP sages that I encountered everywhere on the internet.

Despite this, I was thrilled when I won a full version in an online contest! However, although my initial installation incorporated the first patch, rather than improving upon X in the startup and resource utilizaiton departments, it is easily the worst of the three, taking over a minute and half to load! PSP 9, at 32 seconds to load, is positively QUICK in comparison.

Thus I found myself on another mission - to come up with a powerful alternative that wouldn’t cripple my aging notebook. Zaine’s excellent The Great Software List site led me to PhotoFiltre. It loads very quickly (13 seconds), has a simple, uncluttered GUI and does everything that I need it to do and then some. The free version (currently 6.27) is more than capable of replacing PaintShop Pro in my workflow, but I very quickly found myself springing for a license for the Studio version because I really wanted to support development.