Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3: Basics

The new program I will be using to create mymagazine is called Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X3. Its a recent release, and I find it beneficial to have access to the program outside of college hours. I find it similar to Photoshop in features, but far superior when it comes to user-friendliness.

I have found it a natural transition, taking my skills from Photoshop (as demonstrated on the preliminary), and transferring them to this new program. Also, the interactive tutorials in the 'Learning Centre helped me with the rest. I found my first time using this new program far less daunting than my first time using Photoshop.

Here are some of the essential tips I learned first:

After taking my photos in the studio, they need editing if they are to feature on the cover. The first basic step I took to achieve this was to adjust the brightness and contrast. The lighting on my chosen shot wasn't particularly great, so I increased the brightness by 6% and the contrast by 3%. This livened up the photo nicely.

To really bring out the colours of the photo, I adjusted the tonal curves. The optimal shape for it is a slight S shape. After doing this, the darks were made darker and the light colours were lightened. It really adds a proffessional touch to the photo.

Sometimes, you might not want to change the whole of the photograph. To target specific areas in need of change you have two primary options: The Lasso or the Magic Wand. The lasso is a freehand selection device in which the user uses the mouse to define the marquee boundaries. It is especially effective when zoomed in as you can finely pinpoint what it is you wish to highlight.

The Magic Wand tool lets the computer do all the work. It makes decisions based on similar colours adjacent to each other. With one click you can have a plain background selected and ready for editing/removal. When you have an image with similar colours, you may have to lower the tolerance. This decreases the variance in colours selected and fine-tunes how sensitive you want the wand to be.

When you have the background selected, you'll see the 'marching ants' around it. Here's where you can get started on making some changes specific to the internal area. For me, the most used feature at this point is the Background Eraser Tool. You can use this to manually delete the background, or you can click once and hit the delete button for a two-click fix.