A good image editor is the swiss army knife of web design. In the hands of a McGuyver designer, it can do anything. It needs to be highly functional with plenty of gadgets, but it also needs to be lightweight and efficient. No one needs a fifty-pound pocket tool. Multi-purpose knives can be used for building things, fixing things, opening things, and for plain old fun. But what makes them able to do this is their arsenal of gadgets.

JASC's Paint Shop Pro 6 is the essential image editing tool for the frugal web designer. At $99, it may cost a fraction of the competition's price, but it often surpasses programs like Adobe Photoshop in functionality.

Like any good swiss army knife, JASC's Paint Shop Pro 6 includes many useful tools and gadgets. It utilizes image-editing essentials like raster layers, selections, and masking layers. It also includes basic pen, fill clone and other other drawing tools. But Paint Shop Pro goes way beyond the "two blades and a toothpick" scarcity of other professional image editors.

Paint Shop Pro's raster drawing capabilities make image creation easy while leaving room for creative genius. The artist can select brush shape, size, transparency, density, and edge fade transparency. Brushes can also be given textures that make realistic image creation possible.

Paint Shop pro also includes vector graphics support that excels for text placement and modification. Creating text to a bezier curve, angle, or any vector line, a task that could be disastrous in other image editors, is easy with Paint Shop Pro. Just define a vector line with one of the draw tools; bring up a text dialog through a right-click context menu; choose font and color; and you have instant text-to-vector. For other programs, like Adobe Photoshop, adding this capability requires expensive third-party plugins, but Paint Shop Pro natively includes many things missing in more expensive image editors while still retaining plugin compatibility.

Paint Shop Pro's image touch-up and composition features are outstanding. Its support for advanced raster and vector layer interaction as well as masks allows for near-perfection in image modification and composition. Advanced anti-aliasing, feathering, and selection modification options take the "ugh" out of image-composition.

However, Paint Shop Pro 6, like any knife, has a few mostly un-noticed mars. First, its color depth conversion, though very good, is easily surpassed by programs like The GIMP and Adobe Photoshop. Although I like to do much of my image editing with Paint Shop Pro when in Windows, I tend to do go into another program when I optimize gif images for the web. Secondly, the text insertion tool, although it is unmatched with its multiple-font-and-color support, tends to be finicky when utilizing those extra features. It for some odd reason remembers old font/color combinations and tries to re-implement them at the most annoying times. My third gripe about Paint Shop Pro is its display of the marquee around selections. Most image editors place the marquee(the dotted line around a selection) at its absolute position, but Paint Shop Pro places it at the outermost boundary of the selection when it is antialiased. This makes accurate shape selections difficult to create. Usually, I get around this by using the freehand tool or antialiasing after making the selection, but it has annoyed me to no end on some occasions.

The few weaknesses that Paint Shop Pro does have are greatly outweighed by the benefits of this fine program. Its many gadgets and superb capabilities make this a great choice for both the McGuyvers and McGuyvers-in-training of the web design world.