Having dropped the 'Photo' part of the name in version X4, Paintshop Pro X5 was derived from Ulead Photo Explorer after Corel's acquisition of Ulead. įrom 2006 to 2011 (versions XI to X3), PaintShop Pro was marketed as 'Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo'. PaintShop Pro X7 includes content-aware features such as 'Magic Fill' and 'Smart Edge' as well as support for XMP sidecar files that preserve edit settings for raw formats. PaintShop Pro X6 was the first to be available as a native 64 bit version (purchase includes both versions). PaintShop Pro 5 added support for layers as well as CMYK and HSL colour modes, included JASC Animation Shop for creating animations and in fact was marketed as 'Paint Shop Pro 5.0 with Animation Shop'. Most newer versions are only commercially available although some have been distributed in the United Kingdom in computer magazine CDs after they became obsolete. Paint Shop was originally distributed as shareware and is still available at many download sites (4.12 being a popular version). It was released by Robert Voit in August 1990.
Originally called simply Paint Shop, the first version, 1.0, was a basic picture converter between BMP, GIF and PCX formats, conceived by Robert Voit and developed by Joel DeRider. Paint Shop Pro 1.0 (pictured here running on Windows XP), was released in 1992 for Windows 3.1.
