This tutorial is written on November 5, 2003 for Angels Touching Hearts.

I like lots of screen shots, so please allow the page to load.

Paint Shop Pro 8

I am sure that your desktop does not look like mine, because I have changed it to suit my needs. For the time being, we will keep yours at the default settings.

There are many, many tools for you to learn to use in PSP8, but I realize you are anxious to make some pretties, so for the time being, we will just touch on the ones that you will need most. For any of the tools to show up, you must have an open image, and you must also be working with 16 million colors. If you have a .gif open, it will only be 256 colors, so go to the top, click on Colors, then go to the bottom of that box and find "Increase Color Depth", then 16 Million Colors. On my screen above, I have opened a new image size 300 x 300 pixels with a white background. A new image always opens with 16 Million colors.

This is the tool bar. Yours is probably down the left hand side of your screen.

We will start out on the left end with the Pan tool, when you click on a tool, its Options bar automatically opens.

With the Pan tool, you can move your graphic around, you can also zoom out, or zoom in with it. You can play around with it, to see what all it will do.

Mover tool:

With this tool, you can move your text around, move your tubes on your graphic.

Selections Tool:

The Selection Tool is used to pick out a part of an image, where you can edit just that part without affecting the rest of the image. For example, if you have an angel image, and she has pink wings, and you want to make them white, you can use your selection tool to select just her wings, then apply the white color to them, meanwhile keeping her pink dress. A selection is identified by a border of black and white dashes, otherwise known as "marching ants".

Dropper Tool

When you click on this button, your pointer turns into an eye dropper. You use this to pick out your colors. It will pick up any color from an image that you like. This tool is used in conjunction to the Materials Panel below.

Materials Panel

This has 2 buttons at the top, the Colors, and the Swatches, we aren't going to be concerned with the Swatches yet, so just click on the Colors, for the time being. Your Materials Panel is broken up into 2 sections, the "select panel" box, and the "active colors" boxes. When you move your Dropper tool over the Rainbow colored "select panel", you can select any color you like. If you left click over a color, that color will appear in your Foreground Active Color box. That is the top (white) box in the screen shot above. If you right click over a color, that color will appear in your Background Active Color box. That is the bottom (red) box n the screen shot above.

You can also left click on either one of your active color boxes, and it will bring up your "custom color" panel where you can pick out many many more colors, and it will give you the Hex colors, and the Html colors. If you right click on either box, it will bring up a small "recently used colors" box. So play around with your colors and see what you can come up with.

The Text Tool

This tool has many, many options that you can play with, and learn about as you play in PSP, and make your pretties, but since we are in a hurry to learn how to make the first pretty, we are just going to use the basic settings here. The default setting is Vector, but we are going to change it to Floating. On the left hand side of your Options Bar, you will see "Create As" click on the down arrow, and highlight Floating. You will learn the difference in these as you go along. Now we want to select our Font. PSP comes installed with many basic fonts, but since I have been adding to my font collection for several years, I don't really know what they are. Just click on that little arrow under Font, and choose whatever font you would like to use. One good thing about Version 8 is that it gives you a preview to the Fonts, so you can see what they look like. Next we will select the size of our font. The size I am using here is 12, to give you an idea. The red text on the screen shots is size 16. We won't worry about the Stroke width right now. I always keep my Anti-alias checked. If you ever type out your text, and it looks ragged and ratty, check to see if your Anti-alias is unchecked. Then, I always keep my Alignment centered. And Your Font Style is your choice. You can Bold it, write in Italics, Underline, or put a strike through your letters.

Oh yes, one more thing, when choosing your colors for your font, your Background color is what your font will be.

Now play around with your tools that you have learned about today, and tomorrow we will make an image.