>>24
- A waaaay better interface, the best interface IMO, with dockable toolbars which can be made as thin as necessary, plus rollable toolbars and toolbars which you can turn on or off with F2 (a toolbar set) or individually (with other hot keys, all customizable). Can be properly configured to be absolutely minimalist and absolutely productive.
- As
>>32 said, native vector support: You can create vector layers, which contain one or more vectors (or recursive groups of vectors), which can be basic vectors like text, rectangles, ellipses or geometric shapes (with nice polygon/star/spike/etc. generator), as well as outlines (with bezier, point editing, cutting, merging, customizable arrowheads, etc.). Vectors are made of one of/both of: a contents material (which can be a colour, gradient (including alpha channel) or pattern (PSP has a library of color, gradient and pattern swatches, and a global material library), and a border material (same as content) plus border width. Vector layers also include alpha properties, and naturally, they can be used in combination with raster and adjustment layers and layer groups. You get a nice, structured tree of all layer groups, layers, masks, groups inside vector layers, and vectors inside groups. There's also a shape library for readily insertable preset shapes classfied by directory.
- Art media layers with real-life-like tools that get wet or dry and stuff, I don't use it, but real-life artists may like it.
- Nice brush system where you have brushes out of basic shapes which you vary in size, aspect, hardness, density, and more, and custom shapes (alpha images) which can be scaled and modified in a similar way; then you have application properties to decide how the brush is to be used (e.g. varying size with direction, oscillating size with stroke, jitter, etc.); finally you can save brush libraries.
- Very fast, high quality (bilinear) zoom for editing (can be turned off if you don't like) and well thought window resizing policies, as well as keys for movement. Well thought keys for dealing with selections, layers (oh, and there's no retarded thing such as layer size, but you have optional transparency/layer lock), copying and pasting vectors on vectors, vectors on raster, merged images on raster, etc.
- Also includes other advanced features such as Python scripting (can visually record macros, then hand tune them if you need, or just write them from scratch), history viewing, editing and saving (can change something many steps behind in history then replay everything else you did), 16 bit per component, and a good library of image filters and deformators, as well as the classic custom image filters, image arithmetics, colour balancers and options, and Photoshop filter plugins.