Paint Shop Pro 7 Tutorial: Introduction & Basics

First off, I'm going to introduce you to a couple of useful Paint Shop Pro tools. Do you have PSP open? Follow closely.

First thing you do when you open PSP should be to ensure that all the right toolbars are visible. To do that, click on View at the very top, go down from there and select Toolbars, and check the following: Standard Toolbar, Tool Palette, Color Palette, Layers Palette, and Tool Options Palette. These are the only toolbars that I ever really have out, and they're very useful, so I suggest you keep them open at all times.

Standard Toolbar; Not much that's actually too useful here - the two tools that I'll introduce you to beside the obvious save/open and crap are help and capture.

Help; it's pretty obvious what this one does ^_- But it's a useful tool nonetheless. Click on it, and then click on the object you're stuck with, and it'll briefly tell you what it is. If you're just figuring things out in PSP, it might come in handy.

Capture; This is for screen captures and to capture things off your desktop - I'll have a tutorial specifically on how to do that.

New; This one's pretty obvious. When you click on it, you can adjust the width and height of your new image. Keep the image type at what it is, and you can change the background color or transparency.

Tool Palette; This is probably the most useful and basic PSP thing you'll have to master. I only use some of the tools on here, even though all of them are useful. I'll introduce you to the ones that I use the most; I'm sure you can figure everything else out yourself by experimenting~

Zoom; If you want to zoom into parts of your image to help you get more details or if you want to zoom out to see a better view of the full picture, this is what you use - to zoom in, left click, to zoom out, right click. Or if you have a mouse scrollbar, you can skip this tool and zoom it in and out by scrolling.

Select; One of the most useful things ever - it allows you to select certain parts of pictures and do specific things with them.

Dropper; Select this tool, and then click on a part of a picture you're working with and it'll change the color on your color palette to the color of the place you just selected.

Clone Brush; Another one of the most useful tools ever for advanced techniques - right click on a part of an image to clone it. Left click on the same image or another image to show the cloned image.

Color Replacer; Right click on your color palette the color you don't want anything, and the left click is the one you want to replace it with. Then just go and replace.

Retouch; Another thing that you probably won't need right away, but can be helpful advanced techniques. Use retouch with the Tool Options Palette to be able to do many things to your picture, i.e. soften, smudge, etc.

Eraser; The eraser brush... easy enough, eh? I use the eraser more than just to erase errors though, sometimes. That'll be covered more in depth possibly later.

Airbrush; This is what you'll use to draw in things if you ever need to or to utilize brushes.

Text; To write with small or pixel text in PSP, you want the primary color in the color palette to be null.

Color Palette; Okay, I've been rambling on and on about the color palette, let me introduce you to it. This is the color palette:

It's at the right side of your screen; pretty obvious, hm? Here's the basics of the color palette. The little square that's red right now is the result of your left click - your primary color palette color. The one that's white can be changed with your right click. Similarily, if you left click or right click on a picture, that's the color that will appear. To change those colors, right click or left click on the colorful big window - you'll see the dropper go over it, and you'll see the color your dropper is going over at the bottom, where the box with the big X over it is. You can activate the dropper by holding down CTRL over an image.

Another way to change the colors is to click on the little color squares - It'll bring you to a window that gives you the basic colors, then a circle with a square inside. This is actually the better way to select. The HTML Code for each color you select is presented to you at the bottom of the window, and that's what you can use if you want to make text or background a certain color.

If you click on the little arrow next to each box, you can find other interesting things. Under styles, your main two boxes, you'll find gradient - you can see I use this a lot in combination with flood fill! You can null your colors too if you don't want a color there for whatever reasons.

The texture boxes I've never used much - they never gave me too many great effects or anything, but feel free to experiment around with them too if you want to achieve ineteresting textures.

So that's it for the color palette. You can experiment around yourself and figure out everything, but it's really one of the most useful tools in PSP.

Tool Options Palette; I'll take it back if I said anything else was the most important thing you'll use - this is. That is, if you want to make your images pretty and do more advanced effects. Always keep this open and look at it and adjust with each tool you click - it's super mega useful. An example of the Tool Options Palette is below:

Antialias; You'll see this word next to little boxes that you'll check for various things IE text. If you check it, your borders will automatically be smoother and blend in better with the background. I suggest that you have this checked at almost all times except for when you are writing small/pixel text.

Also, once you open an image, you'll find a lot more options at the very top besides just the "File, Edit, View, Help" etc. You'll discover Effects and Colors and Layers and tons more that will definitely be covered later on.

Alright, now that you've got most of the basics, you can go back to learn some slightly more advanced things now.

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