Here at work I use Paint.NET, not overly powerful but miles better than standard paint. At home I'm using Paint Shop Pro 9 which is very comfortable and rather easy to use, compared to Gimp. IMO, Gimp is just horrible. Completely unstructured, slow and whoever thought that seperating your program in multiple free floating windows was a good idea is a jerk
If you can get what you want from MS Paint then there's no reason why you have to use something else, but if you ever get the chance to have a play with photoshop then take it, you'll soon realise that by comparison Paint is a toy which actually does very little and doesn't even manage to do that very well.
I think paint is easier than paint shop, I would use it just to have it easy making lines, and text. In some ways paint shop is just too difficult for some simple operations. Like pasting a new image into something, I always have a difficulty trying to turn the image.
Paint may appear easier, but in the long run it becomes a lot more frustrating and slower.
Take for example a stupid diagonal line of about 1 pixel wide. In both Paint and Photoshop this can be done easily. But Paint will give you a jagged line because of the absence of anti-aliasing where Photoshop produces a smooth line.
A few hours later you think; the line would better be about 50 pixels lower. In Photoshop you select the layer the line is on and lower it 50 pixels. In Paint however, the line became one with the background the moment you drew it. If there's a complex pattern (like a photograph or gradient) behind the line, you'll have a hard time removing the line and redrawing it lower. In many cases it will simply be impossible without redoing a lot of work.
And this is just a simple example. Think about more complex situations were you wished you could still grab a part in Paint and edit that. In Photoshop all that is standard behaviour thanks to the layers. Rotating objects, resizing without loss of quality (vector),...
That doesn't mean Paint is useless. In fact, for quick 'n dirty low level bitmap editing I think it's a great program and I still use it quite often. But as soon as you start doing more complex tasks where you may want to change several parts later on in the process or want to have advanced effects (shadows, glows, distortions, bending, resizing, rotating, transparancy,...), programs like Photoshop will prove to be a huge time saver.
I'm talking about Photoshop, but it's similar for PhotoPaint and Paint Shop Pro of course.
It's been mentioned before, but you should really check out Paint .NET. Although far from as advanced as Photoshop, it combines the simple-to-use interface you know from Paint with several badly missing features in Paint. Think about layers, gradients,... And all that for free
I don't know about Paint Shop (never used it), but I can't imagine it is more complex than let's say Photshop. But what amazes me is that you seem to think Paint is easy for rotating. Take for example a big stripe on the side of you car at an angle of let's say 15°. That's easy to draw with Paint. Now you want some text in that stripe, of course at the same angle. How will you do that?
Exactly, so I really don't understand what "sgt.flippy" finds difficult in rotating things in Paint Shop (or any other good graphics application). It's a easier and a lot better than Paint's 90° rotate mode.
use the shift key when you rotate and scale to keep its original dimensions, the shift ctrl and alt keys will modify the cursor to allow you to make it a bit easier on some actions...
shift will also make it rotate in 45 degree stages too
I know...
) alternatives using torrents.