Jasc Paint Shop Pro: the image editor, and which version is current

2,400 people a month still search for the Jasc name, which means a company that stopped trading in 2004 is still the label most people have for this software. The 4 questions behind that search are always the same: is it still available, is it any good now, which version am I actually looking at, and is my old serial worth anything. Here they are in that order.

What happened to Jasc Software

Jasc Software was the Minnesota company that wrote and sold Paint Shop Pro through the 1990s and into the 2000s, first as shareware and then as a boxed product, and it built the cheap alternative to Photoshop for a generation of people who could not justify the price of the alternative. In October 2004 Corel bought the company and the distribution rights, and the Jasc name came off the product.

The practical consequence for you is a dating rule. The word Jasc on a splash screen, a box or a serial certificate means the copy predates or coincides with that October 2004 sale. Everything after it is Corel: first the X series, then the year-named releases, ending at PaintShop Pro 2023. The spelling moved too, from Paint Shop Pro with a space to PaintShop Pro without one, so the space in a tutorial title tells you roughly how old the tutorial is before you read a word of it.

The line from Paint Shop Pro 7 to the 2023 release

Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7 is the one this archive was written around, and it is 20 years and roughly 20 releases behind the current one. That is not a reason to stop using it if it still runs and does what you need. It is a reason to be careful about which tutorial you follow, because a menu path from version 7 is a guess in 2023.

What your old serial is worth now

Nothing, and there are 3 separate reasons, any 1 of which would be enough:

• Keys were issued per version. A Paint Shop Pro 9 key was minted for Paint Shop Pro 9 and was never intended to open anything else.
• The issuer is gone. Jasc stopped existing as a company in October 2004, so there is no registration desk, no key reissue and no upgrade counter to argue with.
• Current releases are licensed and activated by Corel under Corel's own terms, which have nothing to do with a pre-2004 certificate.

What usually happens next is that people go looking for an old installer, and this is where this page stops rather than helps. It names no download site, no mirror, no archive copy and no key, and it will not explain how to get around an activation or a trial. Old installers of paid software on unfamiliar hosts are among the most reliably tampered files on the web, and the payoff for the risk is a 2004 image editor. Your existing installation keeps working on the machine it is already on, offline, for as long as the operating system tolerates it. That is what an old licence buys you now, and it is genuinely something.

Licence questions about the current program, such as how many computers 1 purchase covers, are answered by the agreement attached to the version you actually buy, not by a tutorial archive. Read that before you buy the second machine.

Is Paint Shop Pro still available, and is it still good

Yes to both, with a qualification on the second. It is available: Corel sells PaintShop Pro 2023 with a free trial, in a standard edition and an Ultimate bundle that wraps extra software around the same editor. It is good in the sense that mattered in 2004 and still matters: layers, masks, adjustment layers, selections, retouching and camera RAW in 1 program that you install and own rather than rent.

The qualification is that the comparison moved. In 2004 the argument was price against features. In 2026 the argument is automation, because Photoshop now removes a background in 1 click from its Contextual Task Bar, detecting the subject and building the mask for you, and Select Subject makes the same selection including hair from the same bar. Judge any editor now on how much of the tedious selection work it does without you. The companion page here, PaintShop Pro, and where it stands now, goes through that comparison, the edition difference and the background-removal technique step by step.

One search that lands here by accident is worth clearing up: queries about whether a paint shop is profitable are about vehicle refinishing businesses, and have nothing to do with this software.

Which Paint Shop Pro techniques still stand

Most of them, which is the useful thing a 20-year-old archive can tell you. Technique outlives interfaces, so the sensible way to use an old Paint Shop Pro tutorial is to take the operation and ignore the menu path.

• Layers. Unchanged, and still the answer to almost every "how do I undo this later" question. Work on a duplicate, mask rather than delete.
• Blur. Gaussian blur is still the correct default. The radius is in pixels, so it scales with the image: a radius of 2 px on a 1000 px wide picture is a different effect from the same 2 px on a 6000 px one.
• Text inside a circle. Still current, and still the same 3 moves in any program that has it: draw the ellipse as a vector path, click the path with the text tool, and the baseline follows the curve.
• Increasing resolution. This is the 1 that genuinely changed. Interpolated upsizing is still soft past roughly 150 percent, exactly as it was in 2004. What is new is upscaling by trained model rather than by interpolation, which lifted that ceiling. Which release of which program offers it is a question for that program's release notes.
• Vector work and .svg. PaintShop Pro is a bitmap program with vector layers, not a vector program. If the deliverable has to be .svg, use a tool built for vectors rather than fighting a photo editor.
• Full screen preview. It is a toggle: the key that entered it leaves it, and Esc is the conventional way out in this class of program.

Old effect recipes are the exception to the rule. The bevels, the glass buttons and the drop shadows at 90 degrees still work exactly as written and still look exactly like the year they were written, which is why The effects this site taught catalogues them with the dating marked rather than reprinting them as instructions.

If you do not want to buy anything

Then buy nothing, and use a program that is free on purpose rather than a copy of one that is not. GIMP is free and actively released, 3.0.6 during 2025 and 3.0.8 on 24 January 2026, and it is the closest free equivalent for layered editing on Windows, macOS and Linux. Krita is free, currently 5.3.2.1 dated 1 June 2026, and is aimed at painting more than photo work. Photopea runs in a browser, opens .psd files and needs no install at all, which makes it the fastest answer when somebody sends you a layered file today. Paint.NET is free on Windows and is the mildest step down from Paint Shop Pro habits.

Those 4, plus Corel's own trial, are the complete list of routes this page will give you. There is no fifth one that is both free and lawful, and pretending otherwise is how a tutorial site gets someone's machine compromised.

Where to go next

PAINTSHOP PROPaintShop Pro, and where it stands nowWhat it is and where it stands nowPHOTOSHOPThe effects this site taught, and which ones aged