I thought I would show you a few helpful hints to using your PSP 9.. usually in time you learn these.. just by 'hands on' working in PSP.

These are not in any kind of order... its just as they come to me..

#1. You know how we always copy a tube or graphic and paste it to your new  canvas window? this is another good way to do it instead of copying and pasting.

#2. When your  wanting to change the color of either your foreground or background and you click on either the foreground/stroke or background/fill color boxes on your materials palette.

When the Material Properties box pops up.. you can use your pointer to go point any where on your tube to pick a coordinating color.. to fill your canvas with. When you see the right color you want/like click once. and it will replace the previous color you had and be the current color.. click OK on the material properties box now..

#3. Short cut to UNDO'ing a step you don't like.. on keyboard Ctrl + Z comes in handy..

it will YOUR FRIEND!!

#4. You can duplicate layers with out copying and pasting too.

Rename your new duplicated layer.. you RIGHT click on the new layer ON the layer palette NOT on the flower its self...

#5.  Always when you resize a graphic 99% of time it will need to be sharpened

Adjust/sharpness/sharpen

#6. Using 3D drop shadows will make the difference in what quality a tag will look like..

Here below are two examples.. its a BIGGG difference in the 'LOOK' of the tag.. yes?.. there are all kinds of things you can do to DRESS up your creations...

Below I put 2 shadows on the flower and heart.. first a small on in black to make it POP out then a softer more feathered shadow in pink.. around them.. then on the Text I put an inner bevel.. plus a 3D drop shadow. World of difference huh

#7.  Notice how some tubes you get its like several tubes on the same layer? I've had people to ask me.. HOW do I get just that ONE thing off of there that I want... Here's how.

Use your selection tool as shown above, set the selection type 'Point to point'. You just left click going around the tube your wanting, when you get to the last click to enclose it you right click. Copy and Paste it as a new image. or Copy and paste it as a new layer, if you have another canvas your working on.

#8. Some graphics are very pretty if you mist them...here are some ' hints' on that

Here is the original picture

If you look on the layer palette you can tell if the graphic your working on is a background graphic. Before you can do most things to it.. you need to convert it to a raster layer. Right click on the background layer on the layer palette and choose 'promote background layer'

Click your selection tool as shown below and set the selection TYPE to what ever shape you want the misted pic to be.. here I choose Ellipse, set the feather to 20 *play around with this to different numbers and see what it does.* Draw/drag out your selection on where you want it on your graphic. Once you do that.. as below then you go to Selections/INVERT then CUT or delete.

 After I inverted and cut the extra around the bowl of violets.. I ADDED a new raster layer  below the flower layer and filled it with a coordinating color then merged the two of them. See sample below.

#9. Some times we need to know how to make something seamless, like when making backgrounds etc... depends on what kind of seamless your needing.. if your making stationary and your image is like 1024 x 300 and your need to tile it vertically or horizontally.. or sometimes both...

This below is sample of a  background tile that I need to make seamless.

These settings above is for a seamless tile in all directions...Bidirectional..

#10. There are times you want to change the color of just one part of a tube/graphic. In the below graphic I want to change the color of the Heart. Use your Freehand selection tool as shown , 0 feather and carefully go around the exact edges where the heart touches the flowers.. where its on the transparency you don't have to worry or get that close..

Go to ADJUST/Hue and Saturation/Colorize

The Hue is the Color your wanting.. the Saturation is how light or deep of a color do you want. Try different combinations to see what you like..

#11.  Inner bevels are used to make a tube or text more dimensional.

Here is the settings I used for mine.

Settings for the 3D drop shadow

Below is samples of each..

#12. Cleaning up stray pixels on tubes where someone didn't do a good job... is a must!!

#13. Using the Warp brush...is a very cool effect. And comes in handy when your making an animation where the graphic moves.

I mostly use the Push/pull warp mode.. but to make an animation so that it looks like its breathing you use the EXPAND

NOTE:....when you use the warp tool.. on a graphic you need to use your selection tool set on circle and make a lil selection just on that place you used the warp brush on, and SHARPEN once... or it will be blurry and not look good.

#14. Adding a frame to a canvas/project. You don't have to worry about merging all the layers... when you add the frame it will do that automatically. Go to IMAGE/Add a border. The ADD a border box pops up like below.. to make the frame the same size on all sides.. make sure the symmetric box is checked.. if you want for instance the top and bottom wider than the sides then you would UN check that and adjust accordingly on how you want it to look. If you click on the color box there on the Add border window.. the materials box will pop up you can then point with your mouse anywhere out side the box on a place on your graphic to match a coordinating color.

Below I added a 2nd border in purple as you can see.. made it a bit wider than the first pink one.. it was 12 pixels. *not shown* I now used my magic wand tool as shown and clicked on the pink frame and applied a 3D drop shadow.. this time using purple and not black. it makes the frame kind of POP.  I also clicked on the purple outside frame with the magic wand tool and applied an inner bevel.

Here is another way to make frames.

If you will notice on the flower pot  above it has a small gingham heart... I made a selection of 4 of the squares and made it seamless *explained above*.

I'm going to use this gingham 'fill' as a frame.   Set your materials palette to pattern ,if you notice, any graphic you have open on your PSP desktop will show up here on the material patterns drop down list... you can see the green gingham pattern and its tilled . I used at 100 %

I filled the FRAME layer with this gingham fill pattern.

After you fill the new layer with the gingham you go to Selections/Select ALL/Modify/contract...

I used 15 pixels.. that will be the width of the new frame.. then I CUT or Delete.

I filled again on the same layer with a pink color and did the same as above. Selections/select all/modify/contract, but only did it by 2 pixels this time then cut. INVERT/ and applied a drop shadow in black on it.. finished below..

I know I can come up with lots more hints and tricks... but will save them for the next tutorial.. I hope some of these helped..

till next tutorial

TOODLES

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