The best programs for registries, as far as I know, are Paintshop Pro and Adobe Photoshop. I use Photoshop and my registries come out quite nicely. Never be the best above all, but my registry work can stand up to others.
The curve of the registry needs to be more severe, and the stroke needs to be set inside, not outside, and reduce the opacity to roughly 70 percent at most. This is all depending on if you're using Photoshop. Here's a sample. Since I only made it for demonstration, I didn't bother much with increasing the JPEG quality when saving, but if you follow my advice, you should get something like this.
Also, one more bit of advice. In my opinion, if using Photoshop, it's always a good idea to use a larger font size than you need, and rescale the text layer down to what you want. This helps to preserve quality when doing registries in Photoshop, and also if you're using the Warp Text tool, since the tool tends to stretch the text.
Examples below.