PSP Tutorials on the Web

There have been many versions of PSP, and finding tutorials can be a complicated task. I use PSP 9 these days, but I think started with Version 5. PSP 10 (or PSP X) is available now, and there are some tutorials becoming available.

You won't find much of use on the Corel website. Paint Shop Pro was intended by Corel to be a photo editing program, not to compete Corel Draw or Corel painter. But any artist could have told them that a house paint brush or even a pastry brush can be wielded on canvas to sensational effect, and so those people who got their hands on PSP for photo editing purposes couldn't resist doing other things with it. You can draw with it, paint with it, collage with it, and anmate with it, all well within its editing capabilities.

One of PSP's most endearing little tricks is the Tube, a pre-drawn graphic that you can paste into images. People have gone mad in the past creating tubes. Some very nice packages of tubes can be downloaded from Corel itself, and at Barb's Playground.But these are more for fun than true creativity and usually there is some disclaimer about their use being for personal use only (whatever that means).

But tubes of a kind are essential in collage,or if you want to change the background of a photo. Then you make something like a tube of your collage element or subject and paste it into the canvas. There's a very good tutorial on making tubes at Cathy's Corner - it is intended for PSP ^ and & but works just as well on later versions. You don't have to save it as a tube, I go through the tricky business of isolating the image I want, then set back and foreground colour to the same colour (I use white) so I can save the image as a .jpg. Then, as long as I make sure the back and foreground colour are white, I can paste the cut out image into another background.

In this screen capture, you can see my quasi tube in the center,and both foreground and background palettes set to white under `materials' at the right of the screen. I can paste this into another image as a transparent image without the white background showing up. Todo this, right click on the image and choose `copy'. Select he image or background that you want toplace the image in,right click and choose `paste' This will give you a second menu, choose `paste as transparent selection'.

There are some basic tutorials for PSP 5 and 6 at PSP Interactive Zone
and some tutorials for PSP 9 at Maegg's Graphics.