[ariehkovler]

Paint Shop Pro was the best.

I was not as honest as the author of this article. I didn't buy Paint Shop Pro and I didn't write to its creator. I got a free trial on a cover-disk of some PC magazine and managed to extend the trial indefinitely via some hack or other.

Until then my only image editing tool was Microsoft Paint(brush), and PSP was a whole new world. Layers, clone tools, airbrushing. It was amazing. I was one of the few kids in my school who could edit images like that -- there were a couple who had Photoshop because their parents did design or photography.

Then at some point they clamped down on dodgy users, but by then Adobe had old versions of Photoshop out for free and eventually the GIMP made it to Windows.