Software Update: Paint Shop Pro 7.0 Beta 5

The seventh edition of Paint Shop Pro has been in beta for a while now. Now there is a new beta version out, the fifth already. I couldn’t find the release notes, but it seems to me that only some buggies have been fixed. Anyway, here’s a part of the list of innovations in PSP 7.0 (which were already in the previous beta):

• Automatic Contrast Enhancement, Automatic Color Balance, Automatic Saturation Enhancement and Fade Correction commands provide quick, automated, and easy-to-use tools for correcting common problems with digital photos.
• The Edge-Preserving Smooth, Texture-Preserving Smooth, Average and expanded Median commands allow removal of various types of image noise.
• Preview in Web Browser will load and preview an open image in up to three user-defined Web browsers. Before the preview is displayed, you can select to display the image in Bitmap, JPEG, PNG or GIF formats. Selecting JPEG, PNG or GIF will run the appropriate Paint Shop Pro optimizer, then display the image in the selected browser.
• Several great new special effects have been added to the program, including: artistic effects such as Aged Newspaper, Brush Strokes, Colored Foil, Contours, Enamel, Sepia, and Topography; Sunburst and Lights illumination effects; Polished Stone, Sandstone, Soft Plastic, Straw-wall, Fine Leather, Rough Leather, and Fur texture effects; and Page Curl.
• Vector information can now be read, retained and saved. The program will read supported vector information from CDR, CMX, DRW, DXF, EMF, GEM, HPGL, WMF, and WPG format files. Vector information created in Paint Shop Pro can be preserved by saving the output file in WMF or EMF format.
• A Repeat command is now available to repeat the last command used.