I thought I'd put together this tutorial to help my new students... We always get together and us go over this.. the captures here ought to help.

Go to FILE/Preferences/General program preferences first.

On the Miscellaneous tab UNCHECK the show splash screen *that always bugged me* :-)

On the Display and Caching tab on the left under presentation.. have all of those checked. Every thing else is left on default settings.

On the Transparency and Shading tab.. this is where you can set the color of your transparent grid or checks.. default is grey.. and I HATE grey.. so... I made mine pink.  This is just your personal preference. Click OK..

Go back to File/preferences/ file format Asso.  Select ALL then click OK

File/preferences/Autosave settings.. Check to enable then set it to 2 mins.. this way if you loose power or PSP freezes and closes and when you open it again MOST times it will open what you were working on...

File/preferences/File Locations. This is important to know... When you install PSP it puts a folder in your documents... called 'mypspfiles' a folder with lots of folders inside of it... you need to make ONE more folder inside of it.. called plugins. These folder inside the mypspfiles folder.. is where you put all your 'goodies' you collect for PSP. Like brushes, gradients, patterns, plugins, scripts, etc... there IS a picture tubes folder but the Jasc software tech warned me *back when they owned PSP* to never put your tubes you collect inside the picture tube folder.. keep your tubes in another tube folder either in documents or another hard drive or on desktop.. that way your PSP isn't bogged down so bad with loading all those tubes.

As you see below.. you click on the left side what ever file your wanting to add to, for instance Plugins. Now on the right side ADD  *browse to* the new location of the new folder you just made inside Docs/mypspfiles named Plugins.

In other words you can store different things for PSP like masks, gradients, plugins, brushes etc in other locations or on other hard drives.  JUST so you tell PSP where to look for it.. so it can use them. Do this in FILE LOCATIONS.

Here is a zipped file of empty TUBE folders already named for organizing  your TUBES. When you download the zip.. just EXTRACT HERE.. don't try to use your unzipper to see inside.. it will look like its empty if you do that.. just put the zip where your gonna want to store your tubes and right click and EXTRACT HERE.

TUBE FOLDERS