Yes, Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro are both pretty good.
They don't do the same stuff. Photoshop is, well, intended for working with photos (although of course there's nothing to stop you from working with drawings and such) and scanned stuff. Not going to say much about that because there are others here (and elsewhere) you can ask for information
.
Paint Shop Pro has its advantages--and, in fact, it might be what you're after if you want to do abstract
graphics work. For starters, it actually has--get this--an
oval tool! I don't know about recent versions, but the Photoshop 5.5 program I work with has nothing of the sort (and even MS Paint has one fer pity's sake!). It can also import Photoshop plug-in filters and has a selection of built-in fill patterns to choose from if you like (
I only found out about that last recently ). As with Photoshop, you can use layers.
However, PSP does not offer as much in the way of options for saving images as does Photoshop. But if you're after PNG images, you may not care about whether you can fine-tune the size of JPEGs or whether you can open TIFs.
I'm not too sure about PSP's abilities with anti-aliasing text. Either it or Photoshop doesn't impress me in that area, not sure which.
(Edit) And of course there's always that wonderful standby, Powerpoint.