Damian Cugley’s Weblog

Paint Shop Pro 8 (a Windows paint program) is out in beta and uses Python as its scripting engine. It also has new distortion and fancy brush features. (Found on Kevin Altis’ Radio Weblog via Garth T. Kidd.)

Having a Python scripting engine is interesting in two ways. First, it will help people who have to do complex, repetative work with lots of images in a day—as part of a web publishing or video game development pipeline. Second, it could enable an aftermarket in plug-ins for fancy graphics effects (and it will be easier to write them in Python than it would be with some C++ plug-in interface).

This might be useful at work—I use PSP 7 for what little graphics work is required—and perhaps evan at home (I sometimes use PSP on Jeremy’s NT box). I already use Python and Tcl scripting with graphics files as part of this web site (for example, the photo albums), but a scriptable paint program would have a larger repertoire of graphic effects. Could be interesting.

4 March 2003

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