Jasc Software Announces Public Beta of Paint Shop Pro 5 with Animation Shop

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JASC SOFTWARE ANNOUNCES PUBLIC BETA OF PAINT SHOP PRO 5 WITH ANIMATION SHOP

Latest Version of Award-winning Full-featured Painting and Image Editing Program Adds Animation Wizards, Layers, Additional Tools, and Other Advanced Features
MINNETONKA, MN (February 20, 1998) -- Jasc Software Incorporated, a leading developer and publisher of graphics and multimedia software, today announced immediate availability of the public beta for Paint Shop Pro 5.0 with Animation Shop. The newest version of the acclaimed Paint Shop Pro series of image viewing, editing and conversion programs adds an extensive list of innovative and powerful new features including image animation. The complete file may be downloaded from the Jasc Software Web site at http://www.jasc.com.
Paint Shop Pro 5.0 with Animation Shop is a complete Windows 95 graphics program for image creation, viewing, and manipulation. Paint Shop Pro 5.0 with Animation Shop provides a rich and extensive set of tools for photo retouching, painting, and image and color enhancement in graphic design applications of all kinds. It also offers image format conversion, complete screen capturing capabilities and wide flexibility in image creation, viewing and manipulation. One of the most popular graphics programs on the market today, the Paint Shop Pro series has won an impressive list of awards including the PC Magazine 1997 Program of the Year, PC/Computing MVP Finalist (Professional Image Editors), PC Graphics and Video Editor's Choice: Top 50 Creative PC Products, and BYTE Magazine Editor's Choice Award of Merit.
One of the exciting new features of the software is Animation Shop, a powerful new image animator. Using advanced wizards, Animation Shop helps users quickly create graphic animations -- even including sophisticated image and text transitions. An optimization wizard ensures consistent colors and efficient Web downloads.
"Paint Shop Pro 5.0 with Animation Shop provides the power and flexibility of much more expensive professional programs," commented Chris Anderson, Vice President of Marketing at Jasc Software. "With its extensive list of new features and new animation capability, this latest version will maintain Paint Shop Pro as the most popular graphics program available today."
Paint Shop Pro 5.0 with Animation Shop supports nearly 40 file formats, including JPEG, Kodak Photo-CD, PCX, and GIF. Newly added file formats include Multi-layer PSD, Kodak PhotoPIX, FlashPix, Scitex CT, Pro Photo-CD, 24-bit IFF, PSP, and enhanced metafile.
Adding to the richness of the image creation capability, complete layer support has been added to Paint Shop Pro 5.0 with Animation Shop. Layer functionality includes comprehensive blend mode controls, layer grouping, naming, visibility, transparency locking, user masking, and variable opacity. A layer palette permits users to control layer actions and other characteristics. Users can easily add, duplicate, delete, arrange, view, merge and perform other layer operations. The entire image, or just selected layers of the image, may be rotated and resized. Resizing may be based on the actual print size or on percentages. Resizing options also include smart, bilinear, bicubic and pixel. Users may define viewable grids and display optional on-screen rulers.
Increasing the capability of Paint Shop Pro 5.0 with Animation Shop for use in digital photography, direct support for Kodak DC40, DC50 and DC120 digital cameras has been added. Increased TWAIN support and direct support of pressure-sensitive drawing tablets add to the program's available input methods. In addition, further expanding the professional applications of the software, users may now print CMYK color separations directly.
Users will be delighted with the wealth of additional editing capabilities. In addition to multiple levels of undo (limited only by available hard disk space) with viewable history, a number of new selection tools have been added. Retouch brushes now include dodge, burn, saturation, hue, lightness, and HSL to target modes. An adjustable cropping tool and Free Form deformation tool have also been added. The already powerful image manipulation capabilities have now been further enhanced with the addition of arithmetic, buttonize, blur, gaussian blur, sharpening and unsharpening.
The new Picture Tubes brushes insert a sequence of graphic elements such as letter blocks, pointing hands, rocks, old cars, candy, etc. as the user drags the mouse across an image.
The comprehensive color manipulation capabilities have been expanded to add the shifting of color ranges, splitting channels to HSL and CMYK, combining channels, and the use of the Octree method for decreasing colors.
The new tree-based file browser uses a Microsoft Explorer-style interface. Adding support for specialized file formats, Paint Shop Pro 5.0 with Animation Shop now supports Photoshop file format plug-ins. Custom input/output devices such as printers and scanners are also supported through Photoshop import/export plug-ins. Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro plug-ins may be organized in multiple directories, facilitating hard disk organization.
Paint Shop Pro 5.0 with Animation Shop requires Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0. Paint Shop Pro 5.0 with Animation Shop is scheduled for production release in April 1998 at a price of $99.00.
About Jasc Software, Inc.
A leading Windows software developer since 1991, Jasc Software Incorporated provides computer users of all backgrounds with the power to express and enhance their visual creativity through powerful, intuitive and cost-effective graphics and multimedia software programs. The company's products are used by people who want to create, edit and produce the images that reflect their imaginations.
Jasc Software's products include the award-winning Paint Shop Pro, the complete Windows graphics program for image creation, viewing, and manipulation; ImageCommander, a fast and easy-to-use graphics viewer; Media Center, a complete multimedia file management system; Image Robot, for modifying and saving many images in one quick process; Professional Capture Systems; and Illuminatus, the best choice for easily creating professional standalone multimedia publications.
For more information, Jasc Software, Inc. can be reached at 800/622-2793 or 612/930-9800; fax 612/930-9172; e-mail sales@jasc.com or visit the company's web site at http://www.jasc.com.

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