LVS PSP APPRENTICE Class - Lesson 1


Week 1 - Part 1
PSP APPRENTICE Discussion Board

	Welcome to the first lesson of the six-week LVS PSP APPRENTICE class, and to the wonderful (and addictive!) world of creating your very own graphics. You might want to print out this lesson, so you can more easily refer to it as you work your way through the interface and exercises. Let's start at the beginning..
	The following picture is a screen capture of the main program window with an open image and the main palettes and windows displayed. Yours will most likely look different, but this will help us get started with the main concepts.
	The Tool Bars The title bar at the top of the main program window contains a control icon, window title, and Windows buttons. You see a title bar on any program you run. The Windows buttons on the right will minimize, maximize or restore, and close the program, just like any other program. The menu bar is right below the title bar and shows the menu headings. The menu bar will have different headings depending on whether you have an image open or not. The main toolbar is right below the menu bar and has buttons for frequently used commands. You cannot click on a button that is greyed-out. It means that option is not available for what you are trying to do. To see what an icon will do, just place your cursor over the icon and the name will pop up.

The Palettes

The tool palette contains buttons for the tools you will use for selecting, painting and drawing your images. Each tool has its own button, and you can put your cursor over the button to display the name of the tool without clicking on it. To select a tool, simply click on it. The tools in PSP are categorized as:

Selection tools - Arrow, Mover, Selection, Freehand, Magic Wand and Dropper
View tool - Zoom
Edit tools - Deformation, Crop, Scratch Remover, and Object Selection
Painting and Drawing tools - Paint Brush, Clone Brush, Color Replacer, Retouch, Eraser, Picture Tube, Airbrush, Flood Fill, Text, Draw, and Preset Shape

We will cover some of the tools in more depth than others.

A selected tool and the tool options palette will show you the current settings for the active tool and are used together. There are different settings in the tool options palette for each tool to give you control over what result you want. The tool option palette is a "floating" palette, and can be dragged to any Part of your workspace. The palette title bar displays the palette name, the name of your active tool and the palette roll-up button. You can toggle the "roll-up" feature by clicking on the

button. If you want it to always be open, click the

button. If you don't want it open all the time, click the

button and it will "roll up" when you don't need it. If for some reason the tool options palette disappears from your workspace, you can simply press the letter O to restore it.

The options on the last tab of the tool options palette

control how PSP displays the brush (cursor) and what feature on a drawing tablet is controlled by the pressure you apply. Since most people don't use a tablet, such as a Wacom Pen, the lessons are written with this option set as default - no boxes checked, although you might find the precise cursor option a desirable one. It takes a working knowledge of the program to make a decision on this.

The color palette contains options for using solid color, gradients, patterns, and textures on your works of art. This palette is probably the most important one to understand. If you lose the Color palette from your workspace, you can press the letter C to restore it. We will cover much more on this palette next week.

Docking and Undocking Bars and Palettes

The default layout for PSP has the toolbar at the top of your workspace, the tool palette on the left side of your workspace and the color palette on the right side of your workspace. Wolfie has suggested telling you that by docking the tool palette on the top of your workspace will give you more room for your floating palettes and graphic windows.

The toolbar, tool palette, and color palette can be docked to the side of the workspace or dragged to a free-floating position. A docked bar or palette becomes part of the border around the workspace. If you do dock your tool palette at the top of your workspace, it will look like this:

To undock a palette or bar, do one of the following:

Place the cursor in an area of the bar or palette not occupied by a button, and then drag the bar or palette away from the edge of the Paint Shop Pro window. Or,
Double-click any area not occupied by a button.

To dock a palette or bar, do one of the following:

Place the cursor in an area not occupied by a button, and then drag the bar or palette to the edge of the Paint Shop Pro window. Or,
Double-click any area not occupied by a button.

Remember that this is YOUR PSP, and you can do whatever makes life easier for you.

	The layer palette will show you information about the layers being used on a particular graphic. It too is a "floating" palette, and can be moved to any part of your desk top by dragging the title bar to another location.

The Windows There are 5 PSP windows, but we will only cover 3 of them - The Image window, the Overview Window, and the Browser Window. The other 2 windows are the histogram window and the multiple image printing window. Both of these windows will be covered in a more advanced class.
The image window is either an open image file or the space (canvas) where you are creating a new image. You can have multiple image windows open and can move between the open windows. The active image window is the one you are currently working on. You can move, resize, duplicate, and zoom in and out of an image window. This window is opened by either opening a ready made image, or selecting the File/New, or clicking on the on the main tool bar.

The browser window is what opens when you choose File/Browse

from the menu bar. You can use it to find, open, rename, copy, move and delete image files. The browser window consists of 2 sections. The left side displays the folders on your computer, and lets you select the folder with your images in it. The right side displays thumbnails of the image files in the selected folder. You can view information about a particular image by placing the cursor over the thumbnail without clicking it. Click the thumbnail to select it. Double-click to open the image in your PSP workspace. Right clicking on the thumbnail will give you a menu for managing images.


The overview window contains a thumbnail view of the active image in your image window so you can see the entire image if you zoom in or out on a specific area. It has the "roll-up" feature available also. You can toggle the to have this window stay open or roll-up when not in use. LET'S CHECK IT OUT. Unzip your week 1 zip file, File/Browse to the image "flowers.jpg" and double click it to open the image in PSP 7. Click on the zoom tool icon on the tool pallet and place the magnifying glass that you now have instead of a cursor over the image, and LEFT click to zoom in or RIGHT click to zoom out. Notice that the overview window shows you the whole image, while your image window will only show you the zoomed part of the image. To return the graphic to the original size, click on the Normal Viewing icon on the main tool bar. If you find this window useful and lose it from your workspace, you can restore it by pressing the letter W.

More about the roll-up button. The overview window, tool options palette and layer palette all have the roll-up feature. When the button is set to "roll-up" the window or palette minimizes to its title bar when not in use. You can move your cursor back over the window or palette and it will then expand for use. When the button is set to "locked open" the window or palette remains displayed even when it isn't in use. Any of the following will allow you to enable or disable the roll-up feature: From the menu bar select View/ToolBars and select or clear the "Enable automatic Roll-ups" check box RIGHT click on any palette, choose ToolBars from the menu, then select or clear the "Enable Automatic Roll-ups" box From the menu bar select File/preferences/General program preferences/Dialogs and palettes tab and select or clear the "Enable automatic palette Roll-ups" box
Now then! If you're tired of technical stuff, your brain hurts, and life is otherwise meaningless, click on Part 2 and let's go have some fun!!

Week 1 - Part 2
PSP APPRENTICE Discussion Board

	Let's get some practice on some of the things we have covered today. Don't worry, we will cover the tools we will use in the future. In the meantime, just follow the instructions, and be surprised at what you can accomplish
	The First Exercise: Open a new canvas - go to the menu bar and click on File/New, or simply click on the Open Canvas icon on the main tool bar . You will see an options box. Indicate that you want 300 pixels wide and 300 pixels height. Resolution will be 72.000 pixels (this is the standard for web images). Background color white, image type 16.7 million colors. Then click OK. You now have a brand spanking new canvas on which to work in your image window. Click on the selection tool on the tool palette. In your tool options palette, select circle, feather 0, and check the antialias box. Move your cursor to the middle of your canvas, LEFT click and drag out a circle. When you release the mouse button, you will have a "selected" circle. You can tell when something is selected by the "marching ants" around it. Select the Flood Fill (paint bucket) tool . The options in the tool options window should be Blend Mode Normal, Match Mode None, Tolerance - greyed out, Opacity 100. Take your cursor to the color palette and click on the upper left color box and pick the color yellow on the left side of the color boxes by LEFT clicking on the color. Also, your Styles selection on the flyout (chosen by selecting the right pointing arrow) should be the icon of the paint brush. Move your paint bucket cursor back to the middle of your circle, LEFT click to fill the circle with color. Go to the menu bar and select Selections/Select None, and your marching ants will be gone and you will have a glorious yellow circle on your canvas. Next, click on the paint brush tool . Change your tool options to Shape Round, Size 5, Hardness 0, Opacity 100, Step 25, and Density 100. Move your cursor to the yellow color on the top left box of the color palette (notice how it then turns into a dropper), click on the yellow and select the black color in the upper right box, then click OK. Now move your paintbrush to your canvas and make a smiley face. To paint, hold down your LEFT mouse button - to stop painting, release the LEFT mouse key. If you screw up (oh, do we know about that!!!), you can undo your last strokes by clicking on the undo button and PSP will take it away and you can start all over. You might notice here that Peggy is no artist with the drawing stuff!!! Now - try different brush sizes and see what happens when you change the brush size to 10 or 50 pixels. EXPERIMENT. Try selecting and painting with different colors. The world of PSP is opening to you and we encourage you to experiment. The absolute worst thing that can happen is you mess it up beyond repair and have to start over. When you have a smiley face that you want to show the world, go on to the next step. Now we need to resize your graphic. It really isn't necessary to have a 300x300 pixel smiley face gracing your new homework page. Go to the menu bar and click on Image/Resize. This will give you 3 options in the resize dialog box to resize your graphic. They are: Pixel Size, where you select a new size by choosing a new measurement in pixels, Percentage of Original, where you select a new size based on a percentage increase or decrease from the original, and Actual/Print Size, where you select a new size by changing the resolution or the dimensions. Note that the two are linked. Use the number boxes to enter new measurements in the width and height boxes of the selected panel if you are using Pixel Size. In the resize type box, there are several choices in the drop down box, but in this class we will only use the "smart size". We will use the "maintain aspect ratio" of 1 to 1 in this class. We will use the percentage of original to reduce the size by 50%, Resize Type - Smart Size, Resize all Layers, and Maintain aspect Ratio of 1-1. Click OK to close the dialog box and apply the changes. HELPFUL HINT: After resizing, many images can be improved by using the sharpen effect. To use the sharpen effect, go Effects/Sharpen/Sharpen on the menu bar. If you like the sharpen effect, click ok, otherwise close the option. Now - to save your work. A VERY brief overview of the difference between saving your works as JPEGs and GIFs. There is another extension that may or may not become popular, PNG. At this time there isn't a big move to start using PNGs, so we won't cover them in this class As a rule of thumb, JPG, or JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group), is one of the two most popular image formats (GIF being the other one) used on the Internet. It is optimized for photographs and other continuous tone images (graphics with lots of different colors), but does not do very well with line art, screenshots, cartoons and other high contrast images. The GIF format is used when the image has fewer than 256 colors, will look acceptable with fewer than 256 colors, or when the image contains high contrasts or large blocks of color. There are a number of tools and effects that won't be accessible to gif graphics (they will be greyed out) since they are less than 24 bit or 16 million colors. In order to make those options active on an already saved gif graphic, you will have to go Colors/Increase Colors/16 Million colors, then colors. Then all of the options should be available. To check the number of colors in your graphic, go to the menu bar and click on Colors/Count Colors Used. In my case I have 124 colors. We only see black, yellow and white, but PSP sees all the subtle shading differences. Because this graphic has less than 256 colors, and also has a large block of 1 color, we will save it as a gif. To save as a gif, go to File/Export/Gif Optimizer, and when the window comes up, it will look like this: On the first tab which says "transparency", select none. On the third tab which says "colors" you can enter the number of colors in your graphic. Dithering 100%, Optimized median cut selected. There should be no change in the appearance of your graphic, but the optimizer will compress your image to a manageable size. Notice how it says under the preview pane that the unsaved graphic is quite large (67,840 bytes in my case) under the left pane, to what the saved graphic under the right pane will be (2593 bytes in my case). That's quite a difference with no change in the appearance. If you do notice that there are fuzzies or dots on your preview screen, increase the color - up to 256, and see if they don't disappear. Go to the format tab, and choose "Non-Interlaced", Version 89a. Go to the downloads tab and see how little time it will take your graphic to load in the various internet connections. The point of this exercise is that to make your web pages load faster, it is important to save your graphics with color reduction...or in the case of jpgs, compression. We will cover more about this next week. Now click OK, and you will get a "save as" screen. Select the folder where you want to save your homework graphics, name your graphic, and again, click OK. The Second Exercise: Browse to your unzipped week 1 folder (File/Browse ) and open the graphic named "colors.psp". The psp extension is the default extension on a newly created graphic. A graphic that is saved with the psp extension allows you to go back to it at a later date and make changes to it. You can then "save as" jpg or gif extensions (or File/Export/Gif or JPG) while leaving your psp extension graphic intact. OK ... now lets go to work and change the appearance of this graphic. Select your magic wand tool . On the tool options palette, the settings should be Match Mode - RGB Value, Tolerance 10, Feather 0, Sample Merged unchecked. Put your magic wand over the green triangle and LEFT click. Notice how you have now selected the green triangle as made obvious by the marching ants around it. Now move over to the blue star - HOLD DOWN YOUR SHIFT KEY, and left click the blue star. If you held down your shift key, while doing this, you will now have the triangle AND the star selected. If you want to deselect one of your selections - HOLD DOWN THE CONTROL KEY, and click on the star. Now you are back to having only 1 selection. One more time - to ADD to your selection, hold down the shift key, and to SUBTRACT from your selections, hold down the CONTROL key. Use this exercise to select 1 shape at a time, then select all 4 shapes (don't forget to hold down that shift key when making your selections). Now that you have all 4 shapes selected, choose the flood fill tool , go to your color palette and LEFT click on the upper left color box. Choose a new color ... oh, pink for example, click OK, then move your paint bucket to one of the shapes and flood fill. Since you have all 4 shapes selected, the flood fill will change them all to pink at the same time. If you had only 1 shape selected, it would be the only one to change color. Resize - making your graphic no more than 200X200 pixels. Save it as a gif. See the instructions on the first exercise to do this. Start with counting your colors, resize, File/Export/GIF Optimizer. Post your work on your web site and send the url to the message board so we can all oogle over who did a wonderful job on their smiley face and simple shapes. For those who haven't yet mastered the skill of creating a web page, please send your graphics as an attachment in email to Peggy and be sure to include your first and last names. You're not limited to just 2 graphics. Post all that you have been practicing with. Well, to be practical, no more than 10. Go PSP crazy ! Only one more page of information for week 1, but we promise that it won't tax your brain - well, at least that much. Go to Part 3 to find out what we are talking about....

Week 1 - Part 3
PSP APPRENTICE Discussion Board

	This is a good time to mention some PSP housekeeping things that we can't segue into any of the other lessons, but find this stuff more or less important. On occasion, PSP will slow down to a crawl on your computer. Since the images you are working on are all stored in memory, it is a good idea to clear the memory. You can do this by going to the menu bar and clicking on Edit/Empty/Clipboard and/or Command History. Always work on a COPY of your image. If you open a graphic to work on, instead of making changes to the original, MAKE A COPY of it and work on that. To make a copy of an image, go to the menu bar and click on Edit/Copy, then click on Edit/Paste/As A New Image, or you can easily make a copy using Shift/D on the keyboard. You can then close your original with no changes or damage to it. Try this now. Open a premade graphic, and try Edit/Copy, then Edit/Paste As A New Image, or Shift/D. Very easy to do, and believe us, you will someday see the wisdom in this tidbit of information. End of week 1. If you haven't fallen into a coma yet, we'll be baaaaccckkkk ... Most of all, keep in mind that the whole idea is to have fun with what you are learning.

	LESSON 1: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

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Week 1 - Part 1

The Tool Bars

The Palettes

The Windows

Week 1 - Part 2

The First Exercise:

HELPFUL HINT:

The Second Exercise:

Week 1 - Part 3