Tutorial Three

Tool Bars and Palettes

In this tutorial I will show you where to find the options to customize your tool bars and palettes.

The tool bars make some of the tools which require no more additional settings to be easily accessed from your program without having to go into the Menu Bar Tabs. There is no right or wrong way to have them set as it is an individual choice as to which you have showing while you are working. The screen shots in this tutorial will show you the ones I choose to work with.

Toolbars

You can see from the screen shot that I have 4 of the tool bars ticked. The effects tool bar is at the top right highlighted in pink in the shot below:-

This tool bar gives you quick and easy access to many of the commonly used features of Paint Shop Pro such as Drop Shadow, Bevel and Gaussian Blur. To see what these do, the best thing to do is just open an image and play with the settings, you will be amazed at the vast range of effects you can create.

The standard tool bar gives you the tools in the rest of that same row. Zoom In and Zoom Out are useful tools if you need to do some fine work on a small area of your tag.

The status tool bar is a little more difficult to see at first glance, as it appears at the very bottom of your screen.This first screen shot shows the status bar on:-

Now with it off:-

Can you see the narrow bar at the very bottom of the screen has gone ? That is the status bar.

The only other tool bar I have ticked is tools, and that gives me the tool bar down the left of my workspace. I would highly recommend that you keep this active, it is by default.

Palettes

The palettes give you control over your materials, layers, scripts , history and many more.

Again you can see that I choose not to have all of these palettes open as I find they can clutter your screen.

The materials palette is where you choose your colours, gradients and patterns. I would say that it is essential to have this open in whichever of it's views suits you best.

In this view, the top box shows your foreground or stroke colour, and this is available for flood fill etc by using the left hand mouse button. The bottom box is the background or fill colour and this is available using the right mouse button.

If you click the drop down box by the solid circle, it shows two other settings. If you click these open you can either change your colour to Gradient or Pattern as required. This is available for both your Foreground and Background colours.

The central box under each colour allows you to set the colour as a texture. This can be useful if making a background, or if colouring a specific area where a texture would improve the look of your tag. The right hand button allows you to turn either the foreground or background colour off.

Play around with the settings and see what sort of gradients, patterns and textures come with your program. As time goes by you will find many other gradients, patterns and textures which you will use regularly.

The layers palette to me is also essential as it shows your work in each of it's layers making changing things much easier until a you merge the layers.

In the above screen shot you can see each of the layers in the tag that was being created, and also the materials palette above the layers, down the right hand side of the shot.

The only other option I am going to show you to complete the set up of your workspace is the Toggle Organizer:-

The toggle organizer allows you to view your tubes or files at the bottom of your workspace:-

On gives you this:-

When you toggle off you get:-

I like to work with the files visible unless I am working with a large image and want more workspace.

I hope this has been of use, and that you will follow on to the next tutorial in the series which looks at using Layers.

 

This Tutorial was written in May 2010 by Helen Peachey, and the concept of the tutorial is copyrighted.
Please feel free to LINK to the tutorial and/or print it out for your personal use,
but please do not copy it in any way to put online, pass out or re-write without permission.
The image you create using this tutorial is for you to do what you wish except for monetary gains or for merchandising.
© Peachies Designs and Tutorials. Any Resemblance to another tutorial is purely coincidental.