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).

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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.

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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.