Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro
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.<p>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 <i>and</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.