PaintShop Pro : Java Glossary

Aka PSP. Corel’s, (formerly JASC’s), program for creating *.gif and *.jpg image files. The latest version is 2018 Last revised/verified: 2017-08-08. It is quite a complex tool. The original version was primarily for creating images by painting pixels. The latest version is primarily about doctoring photographs, including removing backgrounds and smoothing skin. If it complains you are out of disk and/or ram space what it really means is you have the print margins set too big. The Corel Community might help. They also have a tutorials section. I upgraded to the Pro X9 version. Oddly, buying it from scratch was cheaper than the upgrade. It comes with all kinds of additional independent programs and add-ons. The basic program itself seems not much changed. The main thing I noticed is the cropping tool is much improved.

Tips

• You have to do a confusing two-stage register. When you buy, you get a serial number aka licence key. There is no menu item to enter it. PSP appears to stealthily snaffle it out of the Ctrl-C buffer. A few days later, it will ask for an activation code. You must press Connect and the PSP website will assign you one. About half a dozen extra packages come bundled with PSP. You must download, install and register each of them separately.
• With the brush and eyedropper tools, the left mouse button is foreground; the right is background. Other times you need to use the left mouse button even when you are thinking background.
• When drawing text, select your font and size before start typing. The dialog box is designed to let you insert a mixture of fonts, colours and sizes in one go. You have to highlight the text to change its size after you type it.
• Layers let you change your mind later about positioning, colour and even of existence of various elements of your image.
• Some tools gray out. They may be waiting for you to temporarily increase or decrease the colour depth. They may be waiting for you to select something with the rectangle, lasso or magic wand.
• That obscene looking colour-replacer icon is useful for converting the backgrounds of *.jpg files to transparent *.gifs.
• There is an undo, but you must let your finger off the mouse button periodically otherwise undo will throw away everything since the last time you did.
• When cropping, first drag the window borders out wide so there is an unused area around the image. Start well above and to the left of the image and define a cropping rectangle to get the bottom and right borders correct. Then crop with Shift-R. Again, drag the window borders out wide so there is an unused area around the image. Then start well below and to the right of the image and define a cropping rectangle to get the upper and left borders correct. Then crop with Shift-R. Don’t try to get all four edges in the same go. If you discover an easier method, please let me know.
• To undo the crop marks, right click on the drawing. Undo and Select None have no effect.
• The problem with the new quick background removal tool it is makes many mistakes and they are hard to to proofread especially if the background was mainly white to start. I needed to take the images into Icon XP for touchup where I can test them against several different coloured backgrounds.
• Corel products unpack the download then install and leave the unpacked install files behind. They can be removed after the install, saving considerable disk space.

The big improvement in PSP X2 was a background removal tool. It does not do alphachannel and it is not perfect, but it does a fair bit of the bull work. I prefer IconXP for shrinking images since it smooths the edges with anti-aliasing. I now use the third-party Tint Guide tool.

Improvements

• I often crop white borders off images. It would be much easier to tell if I had succeeded, if after a crop, PSP left a background of perhaps 5 pixels or so of dark grey so I could more easily tell if I had left a sliver of white. As it is, PSP shrinks the background entirely and I often don’t notice till much later I screwed up.
• When I crop, PSP puts up its default notion rectangle of how I should crop. It won’t let me click inside that rectangle to mark a new rectangle. It insists I modify its hopelessly wrong version.
• When cropping, there are tiny resizing handles in the corners, half way up the sides and half way across the top and bottom. These are so tiny that it requires more dexterity than I have to manipulate them. My mouse keeps slipping off them and I end up moving the entire crop window instead of just a side. Please make them twice as big.
• It would be nice to have a mesh special effect, that would superimpose a fine mesh over the image, as if looking through a screen door or a mosquito net. The effect is used in advertising quite a bit, to make its non-use look extra bright, or highlighted in constrast. The effect I am after is the one you see on highlighting a rectangle on the Windows Vista desktop.
• When they put out a new version they will start sending you ads for the upgrade. Just ignore and they will keep lowering and lowering the price.

Background Erasing

PSP by itself is not sufficient for erasing backgrounds. See background elimination for how.