Paintshop Pro 5: the Images and Colors menus

Paintshop Pro 5:
the Images and Colors menus

This is the second tutorial on PSP 5.0 for this course. The first one dealt with drawing and editing images through the painting tools on the toolbars.

The PaintShop Pro Menu

To see all the options on the menu you need to open a graphics file. Once you have, the main menu looks like this:

We don't have time in this course to learn the whole program, so we'll concentrate on the most useful things for preparing Web graphics. These are grouped under the menus "Image" and "Colors". The functions in both these menus are applied to the whole image; some also work on just the current selection.

The Image Menu

Looks like this:

Flip, Mirror and Rotate let you turn the image vertically, horizontally or a specified number of degrees to left or right. You need a 16-million color depth to get free rotation through any number of degrees.

Add Borders: any color or width; added on to the current image size.

Canvas size: increases the area available for use aroundthe current image, as opposed to Resize, which enlarges or reduces the size of the image itself

Deformations: a lot of fun: many ways to distort an image. Most are not that useful for Web work, though. They only work with a 16 million color-depth.

Special Effects: Web work uses these all the time. Drop Shadow adds a shadow to the selection or whole image; Buttonize makes the image into a button. Chisel and Cutout are used to make text or an object stand out.

Filters: also only work on 16 million colors; also very useful for Web work. Each leads to a sub-menu. The Filter Browser gives a preview screen where you can see what each does, but only one: you can't see the combined effect of two filters applied one over the other, or of "softening" twice, and so on. The "Other" menu has things like Emboss, Erode and Hot Wax Coating.

User-Defined Filters: Some graphics programs include a filter-building kit. PSP doesn't, but it does accept all the filters built for Adobe's PhotoShop, and there are many, many of them on the Web. The PSP section of my Graphics Resources page will give you a start, but this whole subject is outside the scope of this course.

The Color Menu

Looks like this:

Of the first section of this menu, we use mainly the Adjust menu. Here it is:
Gamma-correction lightens the image, the rest are self-explanatory. The most useful are the Brightness... and the Hue... corrections.

Channels are not covered in this course

Edit Palette can also be done by double-clicking on the Foreground or Background color square. It was explained in the second color tutorial.

Loading and Saving palettes enable you to save a color scheme and use it in different pictures. Again, how to do it was explained in the second color tutorial.

Set/View Palette Transparency applies to GIF and PNG files. You can make one color transparent, usually the background in order to get an effect of an irregularly-shaped image floating on the page. For more details and how to do it there's a separate transparency tutorial.

Count Colors Used: tells you how many colors from the palette are actually used in the image. It gives you an idea of how far you can reduce color depth (though the best idea is gained by trying and then Undoing if you don't like the result!)

Decrease/Increase Color depth is explained in the first color tutorial and you should also read the second. For Web work you usually start with a 16-million color depth, and only in the final stage reduce the color depth as much as you can, to save file size. For instance, the screen shots of the menus in this tutorial are saved with a depth of 16 colors and although they're large graphics, the files are only 11K.

Now you can go on to the list of specific tutorials.

	Flip, Mirror and Rotate let you turn the image vertically, horizontally or a specified number of degrees to left or right. You need a 16-million color depth to get free rotation through any number of degrees.
	Add Borders: any color or width; added on to the current image size.
	Canvas size: increases the area available for use aroundthe current image, as opposed to Resize, which enlarges or reduces the size of the image itself
	Deformations: a lot of fun: many ways to distort an image. Most are not that useful for Web work, though. They only work with a 16 million color-depth.
	Special Effects: Web work uses these all the time. Drop Shadow adds a shadow to the selection or whole image; Buttonize makes the image into a button. Chisel and Cutout are used to make text or an object stand out.
	Filters: also only work on 16 million colors; also very useful for Web work. Each leads to a sub-menu. The Filter Browser gives a preview screen where you can see what each does, but only one: you can't see the combined effect of two filters applied one over the other, or of "softening" twice, and so on. The "Other" menu has things like Emboss, Erode and Hot Wax Coating.
	User-Defined Filters: Some graphics programs include a filter-building kit. PSP doesn't, but it does accept all the filters built for Adobe's PhotoShop, and there are many, many of them on the Web. The PSP section of my Graphics Resources page will give you a start, but this whole subject is outside the scope of this course.

	Of the first section of this menu, we use mainly the Adjust menu. Here it is: Gamma-correction lightens the image, the rest are self-explanatory. The most useful are the Brightness... and the Hue... corrections.
	Channels are not covered in this course
	Edit Palette can also be done by double-clicking on the Foreground or Background color square. It was explained in the second color tutorial.
	Loading and Saving palettes enable you to save a color scheme and use it in different pictures. Again, how to do it was explained in the second color tutorial.
	Set/View Palette Transparency applies to GIF and PNG files. You can make one color transparent, usually the background in order to get an effect of an irregularly-shaped image floating on the page. For more details and how to do it there's a separate transparency tutorial.
	Count Colors Used: tells you how many colors from the palette are actually used in the image. It gives you an idea of how far you can reduce color depth (though the best idea is gained by trying and then Undoing if you don't like the result!)
	Decrease/Increase Color depth is explained in the first color tutorial and you should also read the second. For Web work you usually start with a 16-million color depth, and only in the final stage reduce the color depth as much as you can, to save file size. For instance, the screen shots of the menus in this tutorial are saved with a depth of 16 colors and although they're large graphics, the files are only 11K.