ADD
Folders - Under User Data Folders in the file locations
field.
( Must do Custom Install )
In case you hadn't noticed,
new to PSP8 are "Favorite Folders". In every Save,
Save As, Open, etc window you can add folders to a special
button. Saves navigating a bunch of folders and partitions.
BACKGROUND
ERASER - Yes, there are 2 ways to use it, both with
right click. With the center post of the brush on the area
you want to unerase, you can sometimes unerase just that area
without bringing back the background. It's very sensitive
and requires as much care as erasing does. It will only unerase
to the tolerances you have set.
If you right click with the
spacebar held down, it will unerase
everything the brush touches, instantly.
A couple of words of caution.
When using the BGE, refrain from using any other tools until
you're completely done with the BGE. If you use another tool,
you lose the unerase info. Likewise if you save the image.
Neither of those are a big deal, so long as you have the original.
If at some point, you find
that you need to unerase something, you can do a selection
on what you have, load the original, load the selection into
the original, invert the selection and do a quick zip through
with the BGE. It will only erase the selected area. Then,
you have all of your original unerase info at your disposal.
BLACK
& WHITE - Black and White Points isn't for making
greyscale images. Use Greyscale or Adjust HSL with Saturation
set to -100.
My favorite for converting
to B&W is to use Channel Mixer
(Adjust>Color Balance>Channel Mixer). Put a checkmark
in
'Monochrome', then adjust the Constant (%) slider a bit
BLUR
- Under Adjust
BRUSH
OUTLINES - File, Program, Preferences, General Program
Preferences, Display and Caching tab... check show brush outlines.
PSP 8 uses two files for brushes
now... it allows you more control over them.
WHERE
DOES THE PREINVERTED BRUSH GO?
When you unzip the file you should have 1 folder named after
the preset. That folder has two folders in it called Presets
and Brushes. The folder containing that inverted c.PspBrush
file should be Brushes. If you did not change any paths when
you installed PSP Public B1 (or B2) you should find your Brushes
folder for user created items in C:\My Documents\My PSP 8
Files\Brushes. Drop the inverted c.PspBrush file in that Brushes
folder. Drop the file in the .zips "Presets" folder
into
C:\My Documents\My PSP 8 Files\Brushes.
CAPTURE
SCREEN - In the Capture Setup dialog, make sure "Capture"
is set to Area and "Activate capture using" is set
to Right mouse click. (or set it up as a hot key, like F10)
. Click OK. Now press Shift+C to start the capture, then right
click (or press the hot key you set up) to bring up the crosshairs.
CACHE
FILES - Reset Preferences dialog found in the File
menu and reset your brush tip cache by checking "Delete
all cache files". This will force your brush tip cache
to regenerate the next time you start the app.
CHANGE
SHORTCUTS - Easy. Go to Customize / Keyboard, choose
View > Brush Variance there, select the F12 key, hit Remove
to un-assign F12. Now choose File > Save As, go to the
"press new shortcut key" part, press F12, click
Assign.
CLARIFY
- WHERE IS IT? Brightness/Contrast menu
CRASHING
- From Nancy @ jasc
This is a good time to mention
to the group, that if you've done a fair
amount of crashing, you want to delete the items in your Temp
folder. In PSP 8, go to File/Preferences/File Locations. Scroll
down to Undo/Temporary files, click on it and note the location.
The default is: C:\Documents and Settings\"network login
name"\Local Settings\Temp Close PSP 8 Navigate to your
temp folder and everything that's ours begins with JSC*.tmp.
Delete these items. You may want to delete everything in this
folder, but if you do that your safest next move would be
to restart your machine.
This has made my PSP 8 more
stable. ;-)
CROP
TO SELECTION - Do you get a little border when you
crop to selection? Make sure your feather is at 0 and your
anti-alias is unchecked..... It works for me.... : ) TF
CUSTOMIZE
TOOLBAR - View menu > Customize... or right-click
a toolbar or palette and choose Customize...
DEFAULTS
TO MY DOCUMENTS - The reason it defaults to "My
Documents" instead of the Application folder is that
on Windows 2000 and Windows XP, limited users can not write
to the application folder. The only writeable place they have
is in their user profile. Therefore to comply with Microsoft
2000/XP requirements, we default to "my documents".
DEINTERLACE
- Adjust > Add/Remove Noise
EDIT
TEXT - Right click and choose Edit Text from the menu.
The text window opens and you can change the text by highlighting
it and going to the text palette and making your changes.
ERASER
- Just remember that the center of the brush is the "always
erase" area. A number of people get that wrong. You never
want the center of the brush to go over the "keeper"
area.
It samples the background from
the middle of the eraser area, where the arrow is, to determine
what to erase. If you get too close to the edge it will sample
the other part and erase that. Try skimming along the edge
of the object.
ENVIRONMENT
MAPS - In Balls and Bubbles and Manifying Lens, a photo
or other image can be used as As a surface, as a solid material,
as a surface, as a texture applied to a solid color, gradient
or other image as a bump map, as an environment map or any
Combination with interesting results or if you have Blade
Pro or Super Blade Pro, you can use them there
FILE
EXTENSIONS - ( Don't like the new extensions)
If you don't want to use it you don't have to: File->preferences->file
format assocations Select the paint shop pro format press
extensions highlight .psp and press 'preferred'.
Now whenever you save a PSP
format file it will use the .psp extension.
FILE
SIZE - ( No longer on the bottom right side of the
screen ) Now you can find it by going to view/Palettes/Overview.
The size is on the Info tab. It's Memory Used.
FLOOD
FILLING ENTIRE SELECTION - In the Match Mode box at
the top, it should say 'RGB Value'. Change it to
'None' and it will fill all selections simultaneously.
GIF Exporting
- This is from the Jasc group PaintShopPro8Beta and was posted
on 4/16 by Kris Zaklika in answer to a question about exporting
gifs in PSP 8. This still applies:
"I can and you can see
them in many of my posts. The trick is in
knowing how. Try this. Run File > Export > GIF Optimizer.
On
the Transparency tab make the choice that fits whether you
want
transparency or not and whether your image already has transparency
or not. That's straightforward. Ignore the Partial Transparency
tab if your image doesn't have partial transparency. On the
Colors
tab is all the IMPORTANT stuff. SET DITHERING TO ZER0. Set
Color Selection to OPTIMIZED OCTREE or Optimized Median Cut,
whichever looks better. Start with 256 for the Number of Colors
and reduce this slowly if you need to make the file size smaller.
Keep
checking the appearance in the right preview and the file
size
noted under this preview. When you are happy, press OK. Your
files should look just fine and you will see in the preview
exactly what you will be getting."
JPG'S
- You can select the background color of the JPG via
tab and preview in the window on export. This is especially
neat: When you have an image on layer above a transparent
background and that image has transparency or transparent
areas. When you have an image that does not Fill the entire
background - a shape, or cut out of a picture where the background
has been knocked away or erased. When your image layer is
emitransparent.... That color background option is handy and
neat to preview various choices. [black white tones, etc...]
KEYBOARD
MAP - "keyboard map" for PSP8. Go to Help
/ Keyboard Map. The keyboard map is now more than a list of
shortcut keys. It's asummary of all possible commands we can
issue to PSP8 whether or not there is a keyboard shortcut.It's
a long list but it's broken into 14 categories, or you can
see it all at once by selecting All Commands from the drop
down menu.
LIGHTEN
- DARKEN - DODGE - BURN - Left click lightens..right
click darkens. . Same thing with Dodge/Burn.
LINE
COLOR - You can change the color of line you are drawing
by changing the foreground color on the Materials palette
while you're using the tool.
MASKS
- No delete Mask Option
With masks being implemented
as layers, you just need to select the Delete item under the
Layers menu (or press the Delete Layer button on the Layers
palette).
*********
To save a mask, select the mask layer and do Layers / Load/Save
Mask / Save Mask to do disk.
To load a mask, select a raster layer and do Layers / Load/Save
Mask / Load Mask from disk.
Masks that you save are stored in your My Documents\My PSP8
Files\Masks folder.
NODE
EDITING - There is a new tool in PSP8 called Pen Tool.
It is just above the Vector Object Selection tool. That is
what you select to Node Edit . Also, if you notice, your Vector
shape will stay filled when you go into Node Edit. In previous
versions, it would turn invisible while you were in Node Edit
mode. You can still turn it off if you prefer..just Click
the Object Selection tool , right click on your Vector shape,
go to Preferences and uncheck the Visible. It can also be
turned on and off through the Layers box by clicking the eye.
PLUG
IN FOLDERS - It works basically the same as in PSP
7 but no longer limited to just 3 paths. Ok go to the preferences
and click the add button and I use browse to go to the location
or you can type it in. I should load them then (will take
a few seconds depending on size). One other note here when
you start PSP 8 it now caches the plugins also allowing them
to load faster which means faster startups.
POINT
TO POINT LINES - It's not a new feature but choose
the pen tool in Drawing mode and select point to point as
the segmet type. As you laydown a point drag the mouse to
create a symmetric node, the drag will move the leading curve
handle, the direction and length you drag will control both
the length and the direction of the curve, when you have it
right release the mouse button and move the cursor to where
you want to place the next node in the path.
PRECISE
TOOLS ( CROSSHAIRS ) - File > Preferences > General
Program Preferences > Display and Caching tab...place a
checkmark in 'Use precise cursors'.
PRESETS
- One of the frequent posters on the Jasc resource group has
written a script to convert your PSP 7 presets. I've heard
excellent comments about it. I do not know if it will be inlcuded
in the final release of PSP 8, but I sure hope so.
RECOVER
ANTI-ALIAS - This is a description of the Recover Antialias
filter: what it does and how to use it.
When an object is antialiased
and merged with some background the antialiased pixels have
a color that is a varying mixture of the object color and
the background color. This makes the object look like it has
smooth edges. However, it presents a problem when we try to
select the object so we can use it somewhere else. Basically,
we have two choices. We can select only the object without
the surrounding antialias region. This gives a nice clean
object but with jagged edges. Alternatively,we can select
both the object and the antialias region. In this case the
object is surrounded by a halo of color from the background.
(Often this type of selection would be made by
selecting a uniform background and inverting the selection.)Neither
one of these options is very satisfactory. The Recover Antialias
filter is designed to deal with this problem by extracting
the original antialiasing without any contamination by background
color.
RESIZING
IMAGES - PSP 8's Bilinear is true bilinear and not
the same as what was called Bilinear in PSP 5. Use of bicubic
resampling to make an image smaller is bizarre. You should
be using Smart Size as the Resize type to get the best results.
When you do this you
get image that are identical to each other in PSP 5 and PSP
8
within 1 part in 255 in each channel.
SCREEN
CAPTURE - It's in the import menu.
File|Import|Screen Capture
SCRIPTS
- You can put them all in your scripts-restricted folder,
unless the author tells you otherwise, AND is someone you
trust. If you don't know someone or don't trust them... don't
put them in the trusted folder!!!!
Give your script a name. Then,
when you want to repeat the recorded sequence of steps on
another image just do File >Scripts > Run and enter
the name of the script you saved.Scripts are an easy way to
automate activities in PSP.
Actually PSP scripts are written in the Python language
(http://www.python.org) and can do much more than simply record
and play steps in PSP. However, for that you need to acquire
some familiarity with Python.
SELECTION
TOOL - It is in the tools settings just right of anti-alias
check box in a default setup. If you mouse over it says custom
selection.
SHORTCUTS
FOR TOOLS - Right-click on any toolbar and choose Customize.
Click the Keyboard tab.In Category you'll see a Tools listing,
click it. From there you can assing/remove shortcuts for tools.
You will have to remove the "a" shortcut from the
arrow before reassigning it to the airbrush.
Go to View then customize click
on Keyboard and then the CATEGORY dropdown "list"
and scroll down to find Tools.
TEXT
ON A PATH - Deselect the vector shape before you change
over to the Text Tool.
WATERCOLOR PRESET - Do you
mean the preset for Brush Strokes found here in PSP 7: Effects/Artistic/Brush
Strokes. Water color preset= in PSP 8: Effects/Art Media/Brush
Strokes?
WHERE
DO THEY GO? The ones with .pspbrush extension go in
Brushes. The ones with .pspscript extension that start with
Preset go in the Presets folder.
*********
Anything where the file name
starts with "Preset_" is a preset and goes in the
Preset folder. Anything that ends with .PspBrush is a nib
and goes into the Brushes folder.
WORKSPACE
- To access the PSP
7 workspace in PSP 8 go to File - Workspace - Load. There
are 2 options: Default and PSP 7 Workspace - Highlight the
PSP 7 Workspace and click Load.
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