Tour of PaintShop Pro

The first time you open PaintShop Pro (aka PSP) you could be quite daunted by the prospect of using such a huge programme and you may think that you will never know how to do all the things that everyone else is doing.  

I can't promise the moon on a stick, but hopefully by the end of this tutorial you will know what a few of the basic buttons and functions in PSP do and it won't look like *such* a daunting task to make that first graphic :o)

You will need:

A copy of PaintShop Pro - you can download a 30 day trial version from here

Grab yourself a drink, make yourself comfortable, and then open up PaintShop Pro.

You may have a splash screen come up while it's loading - it will disappear automatically so just wait for it to do what it needs to and then disappear.

You'll now have the basic workspace in front of you.  Some things will look familiar from other Windows programmes but most of them will be new to you.  Don't be put off by all the buttons and menu's... they help you to do all kinds of wonderful things!  :o)

Right at the top of the screen you have a toolbar that is common to all Windows programmes.  This is where everything lives in PSP.  

Go to the first menu on the title bar.  The name will be familiar to you, but some of the features will be totally new.  Click on "File" to bring up the dropdown list.

Now we're going to go through each of the options in the list to see what they do.

If you click on "New" it brings up the New Image dialogue box.  I'll say more about the New Image dialogue box later, and there'll be a tutorial on what it all means later on.  The "New" option does exactly like it says on the can - it opens up a new, blank image for you to work on.

The "Open" option will be familiar to you - if you click on it, it brings up a dialogue box that lets you navigate to where an image is saved and it lets you open it for viewing or editing in PSP

The "Browse" option will be a new option but I find it an incredibly useful option and it's the very first thing I open every time I fire up PSP.  There will be a whole tutorial on using it later - it's definitely one of my favourite things about PSP.  By clicking on "Browse" it will open up a new window within PSP that shows you all the images that PSP can see and a little thumbnail picture of what the graphic looks like.

One of the things that PSP can do is to save your "workspace".  The screen you are looking at now and all the screens you look at when you are working with a graphic are what PSP calls your "workspace" and it's got a handy little feature where it can save the whole screen you are working on so that you can bring it up exactly the same at a later time/date.  

This is a handy little option to have, but personally, I wouldn't save a workspace that has a graphic you are working on as that graphic could change at a later date, but the workspace will still have the old version of the graphic... it's probably best to use this feature of PSP after you have done a lot of customisation within the programme that you want to save for another time.

The "Import" option in PSP is for when you want to scan a picture from a paper image into PSP, when you want to take a screenshot (like the ones you are seeing throughout the tutorial) or when you want to download a picture from a digital camera into the computer.

Use the "Screen Capture" option for taking screenshots (you need to set it up the way you like it first).  Use the "TWAIN" option to access your scanner so that you can access the options that let you scan your image into PSP and use "Digital Camera" to set up the options to download the images from your digital camera

The "Jasc Software Products" option is a shortcut to other Jasc programmes you have installed on your computer.  If you download the trial version you may not have anything linked in here, but if you have the full version, and you've chosen to install everything, "Animation Shop" will be linked to in here.  Animation Shop is the programme that is used to animate graphics.

The "Batch Conversion" option is used when you want to change the format of lots of different files, for example, if someone sent you some PhotoShop graphics and you wanted to make them into .jpg's, this is the option you would use to do it

The "Preferences" option is where you do some of the customising in PSP.  There's lots of stuff you can do in here, so I'll go into that in another tutorial.

The "Exit" option does exactly what it says on the can - it closes down PSP