Paint Shop Pro 9

How Is This Book Organized?

Computer software manuals document features because that’s the easiest way to write one: “The File menu presents the following choices. . . .” If fea­tures on the File menu exactly matched what you had in mind, that would be great — but how are you to know to use the Clone Brush tool when what you’re really looking for is the “Fix Uncle Dave’s hair transplant scars” tool?

Some computer books are organized into lessons and teach you how features work. They give you examples of basic tasks and then more complicated ones. Along the way — hopefully, before too long — you find an example that resembles what you had in mind.

This book is organized by different kinds of tasks, like working with photos or painting pictures or adding text. Wherever possible, this book tells you exactly what to do in numbered steps. Wherever that’s not possible, it gives you explanations of how things work in nontechnical language.

You don’t have to read the book in any order. Just skip to the section or chap­ter you need. Go right to the index, if you like — or the Rich Tennant cartoons! In detail, this book is organized as described in this section.

Part I: The Basics

This part puts you in the picture and puts your picture in Paint Shop Pro. Chapter 1 puts you in the picture, by explaining how to efficiently find, open, and manage all your graphics files, deal with the peculiarities of different graphics file types, and even convert file types en masse. Chapter 2 shows you how to get things oriented and sized they way you want. Chapter 3 shows you all the Paint Shop Pro tricks for selecting exactly the area of interest you want to work on, copy, move, or otherwise enhance. Chapter 4 gives you basic editing tricks: how to copy, move, bend, and resize portions of your image.

Part II: Prettying Up Photographs

When you have an image that needs some sprucing up, Part II is the place to turn. Chapter 5 shows you how to get the image you want into Paint Shop Pro in the first place, whether it’s a photograph, a print, or on your PC screen. Chapter 6 shows you how to use the Paint Shop Pro hand tools to brush away wrinkles from portraits, fix scratches, and remove red-eye. Chapter 7 gives you nearly instant ways to correct overall photo-exposure problems, such as bad exposure, poor color, or dim grayish images. Chapter 8 gets into serious adjustment of image quality and content. This part is your Extreme Makeover part (not to be confused with the part Dave uses for his comb-over).

Part III: Painting Pictures

Part III is for anyone who plans to paint, draw, or otherwise doodle in Paint Shop Pro. Chapter 9 gets you painting, spraying, erasing, and otherwise doing all those basic things that everyday folks have been trying to do with graph­ics software for years. Chapter 10 is for those who long for some serious support for the digital artist, by giving you ways to get precisely the color, texture, or pattern you need. Chapter 10 also introduces the new Paint Shop Pro Art Media tools, the closest thing to paint and canvas this side of the digi­tal divide. Chapter 11 shows you how to divide images into layers or use layers to combine images. Layers are a powerful tool that make later editing much easier and produce stunning image overlays. Chapter 12 lets you add layers of easily edited text and shapes to your image, by using the Paint Shop Pro vector graphics tools. Chapter 13 shows you how to add artsy effects to your work.

Part IV: Taking It to the Street

All this fooling around in Paint Shop Pro is great, but in the end you probably want your image to appear somewhere else: on a piece of paper, on the Web, or as part of an animation. Chapter 14 shows you how to best fit your image on paper. It also tells you how to print multi-image pages for photo albums, collages, or portfolios. Chapter 15 tells you how to get exactly the image file you want for the Web and gives you tips for getting the fastest-downloading images with the least sacrifice in quality.

Part V: The Part of Tens

Problems often come in threes, so this book tackles them by the tens, just to be sure. Part V has fixes for the ten most-wanted issues that people run into when they try to use Paint Shop Pro. Chapter 16 untangles the ten most common confusions and perplexing problems of Paint Shop Pro, Chapter 17 gives you ten quick fixes for photography problems, and Chapter 18 is an existential conundrum. It tells you about ten topics too advanced to be in this book.

What Can You Do with This Book?

Books are useful, elevating things. Many people use them to elevate their PC monitors, for example. With that fate in mind, this book has been created to serve an even higher purpose: to enable you to do the kind of graphics stuff you really want to do. Here’s a smattering of what you can do with the help of this book:

* Download photos from a digital camera.
* Fix up fuzzy, poorly exposed, or icky-colored photos.
* Print album pages or other collections of photos.
* Paint, draw, or letter-in all kinds of colors, patterns, and textures.
* Paint like you’re using oil paints and canvas.
* Draw using lines and shapes that you can go back and change later.
* Apply cool special effects to photos and drawings.
* Change colors of objects.
* Combine photos with other images.
* Alter the content of photos and other images.
* Remove unwanted relatives from family photos.
* Add wanted relatives to Wanted posters.
* Retouch unsightly relatives on Wanted posters.
* Create transparent and other Web page graphics.

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