Basic Tutorial One

Opening Paint Shop Pro for the First Time

When you first open your programme it can be pretty daunting as you are faced with an array of tools and tabs that you have no idea what to do with.

Your screen will look pretty much like this:-

In this tutorial I am going to try and go through most of the top menu tabs , so that you can see what each one contains.

First you see the "File" Tab. This has your options for opening new or existing work, and saving your work

Click on New and a box will open for you to set the size and colour depth of the piece of work you are about to create:-

 

The settings above are those I tend to use most often for making signature tags for Forums . The one setting to always check is the Resolution, which should always be at 72dpi. This is a requirement of all of the Licensing Companies, as it's gives a result which looks fine on a web page but is not suitable for printing. Sometimes a tutorial will tell you to use a white background and RGB - 16 bits/channel, in which case your settings will look like this:-

An area will now open in your work space looking like this:-

I have mine set to show the rulers as it makes aligning your work easier as you go along. To do this you go to the "View" tab at the top:-

You will You will see that I have rulers and guides ticked . This tab also allows you to customize your tools , tool bars and palettes, but we will come back to that in a later tutorial.

To look at the "View" tab we jumped over the "Edit" tab:-

This holds the tools to cut , copy and paste and to undo and redo an action.

The next tab along is the "Image" tab. Here you will find tools to rotate your image, resize it, mirror and flip it, change the colour depth etc.

Next along is the "Adjust" tab.

This tab has features and tools which allow you to adjust the colour of sections of your work, add noise, blur the image and make any corrections needed to a photograph.

The "Effects" tab will become one of the most used as you start to create your signature tags as it is where you go to make your tag unique. All the special effects are found here, and when you start to add plug ins into your program they are used via this tab.

I am I am not going to go through al the effects here as it would take far too long. As you do tutorials and make your tags you will begin to discover just how powerful a tool you have in this program. If you have time, open a picture image and just play about with some of the effects just to give yourself an idea of what is what.

Every tag you make will consist of a number of different layers for your background, main image, text, copyright information etc. The "Layers" tab is where you manage all these.

Sometimes you will need to align an "Object" in your image. This is when you will need the "Objects" tab.

I am just going to show you one more tab on the top bar in this tutorial, and that's the "Selection" tab:-

This is one of the other tabs you will soon be using a lot as you gain experience. It gives you the ability to select a portion of an image, load a selection from a file and lots more.

I hope this has given you a small insight into the top menu bar of your program. In the next tutorial we will be looking at the tools down the left hand side of your workspace and learning how to customize them

 

This Tutorial was updated 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.