Tutorial 2Tools Hopefully after working through Basic Tutorial 1 you now know how to open a new image and how to locate many of the inbuilt effects you can create with your program. In this tutorial we are going to look at the tools which are found down the left hand side of the workspace.
For the purposes of this tutorial I have kept the Learning Center open on the far left as this will give you important information about each of the tools. If you click on a tool, the learning center changes to give you information on what the tool does and how you use it. So click on the top tool the Pan Tool as in the above screen shot and you will see that it is used to move about the screen from area to area. Clicking on the drop down arrow next to it, brings up the choice of pan or zoom tool. If you choose zoom, the learning center changes accordingly. I have taken screen shots of a few of the tools and used them so that you can see what can be done. This next one is of the Paint Brush Tool and I have used the tool to put an image of a tree onto my 400 x400 image. This tool comes with a few inbuilt presets, and you can add more as you progress with your skills. There is a separate tutorial later on in the series that shows you a lot more about brushes. You also have the option of using an airbrush which can be useful for creating marble effects, or clouds etc as it does not give such a dense finish
One of the most frequent tools you will use is the Flood Fill tool. As the name suggests this will fill your area, or a selection with a chosen colour.
Left clicking the tool will fill it with your foreground colour, right clicking will fill with your background colour. The colours are determined by those showing in the Materials Palette which you can see in the left side of the palette in the above screen shot. Play about for a while , using different colour's and then experiment with some of the other brush tools to see what effects you can create from two colour's. Underneath the Flood Fill Tool is the tool to access the tubes which come with your program.
A tube is a picture on a transparent background which can be placed on your image, and resized and colorize etc to your liking. You will soon build up a large selection of tubes, but it is wise not to save them to the same folder as the inbuilt ones as it will slow down your program.
Immediately underneath the tube tool is your text tool. I will be covering adding text in a separate tutorial so I will not go into the details of that here. Not all of the tools are placed on the sidebar, and there is one in particular which I suggest you locate and add, as it will be used in many of the tutorials you will find online. It is called the Raster Deform Tool. To locate the tool go to the top Menu bar and find the "View" tab. The look right at the bottom of the drop down and you will see customize.
Click on the customize and locate tools in the left hand menu.
Now locate the Deform Tool in the list on the right panel and drag and drop it into your main tool bar , I chose to place it just below my crop tool. Have a look in the tools and if there are any others that you think you might use, drag and drop in the same way. You can add tools whenever you want them so don't overload the tool bar. If I went into detail of each tool in your program, you would be really bored, so I am not going to. The best thing you can do now is play and get to know the basic attributes of each tool. Many of my tutorials will go into much more detail of many of the tools and effects that you can create. I hope this has been of use, and that you will follow on to the next tutorial in the series which looks at the various palettes within Paint Shop Pro.
This Tutorial was updated in May 2010 by Helen Peachey, and the concept of the tutorial is copyrighted. |
All graphics on this page are © Peachies Designs and Tutorials 2010
