In all of my tutorials for previous versions I have encouraged people to keep their extra PSP Goodies in a folder OUTSIDE of PSP so that PSP does not take so long to load, well now Jasc has made arrangements for you to do that so you don't have to create your own folders. They are located by default in your MY DOCUMENTS folder.. the full path should be-- C:\My Documents\My PSP8 Files.  This CAN be changed on install if you do it but I recommend keeping it this way, that way things are easy for you to find. We will get to the rest of our file locations in a moment.  First off I want you to go ahead and open PSP so that you can see the default workspace that comes with PSP before we customize to suit our own needs.  Below is a screenshot of the default (out of the box) workspace that should appear when you open PSP for the first time.

If you are completely new to PSP you can use Jasc's new learning center to learn different operations in PSP.  If you are not interested in using it you may close it.  In setting up our own workspace you probably won't want it in your way anyway.   All of these palettes are dockable so they may be docked to any part of the surrounding interface if you so choose. I don't care for docking personally, I prefer the rolling palettes which I will also cover here as well.

First thing we need to do is set ourselves up some preferences so that PSP appears how YOU want it to appear and for what works best for you, we will also do the same with out toolbars and palettes. To start setting our preferences lets start with our "General Program Preferences" which primarily control how the program responds to different functions.  To access them you will need to go to FILE>PREFERENCES and then GENERAL PROGRAM PREFERENCES.

This will bring up a new dialog box for you with lots of little tabs to click on with all kinds of different settings for each Tab. We will start with the UNDO tab. It is pretty straight forward but there are a couple things you should be aware of depending on your computer memory etc.

UNDO- We have only a few things to cover so this should move along quickly.  The first box where you see I have checked is to ENABLE THE UNDO, with this enabled you are able to undo actions that you have performed in PSP, it is important to have this checked! At some point you WILL want to undo something! TRUST ME!!
LIMIT UNDO/REDO option, this is all going to depend on your puter and the amount of space and ram that you have available. The smaller the puter/RAM the less you may want to set this too or it is going to slow you down. I, personally have plenty of RAM and hard drive space so I just leave my unchecked meaning that there is no limit to the amount of space for my undo's and redo's.
UNDO/REDO to steps per open image- This number will determine how many undo/redo steps are allowed for each image. I leave mine unchecked that way I can undo and redo as much as I like, if you set a number to this you can always change it back later but I recommend leaving it unchecked.
COMPRESS UNDO/REDO INFO- Checking this will allow your puter to compress this information and help save disk space if you do not have a lot. Be ware though, this can and will slow down your PSP.  Try it if you like, you can always come back and turn it off later.
ENABLE THE REDO- Checking this enables you to REDO something after it has been undone, very important. Please check!

Moving on to the next tab now, simply click the VIEW TAB at the top of your Preferences and you should then see your options. The VIEWING options control how PSP sizes images and image windows after using the Zoom Tool, creating an image, and resizing any image window.

ZOOMING- These first two options are for the zooming tool to determine if PSP automatically resizes a window when you zoom in or out, the window will resize to include as much of your image that will fit into the window.
NEW IMAGES-  When the Auto save is checked, if any image is too large to fit in the window PSP will reset the images magnification so that the entire image is available.
AFTER CHANGING SIZES- When the fit to window image is checked, PSP automatically resizes the image window whenever you resize an image. When the Auto Size check box is selected, if you increase an image’s size to more than can fit in its window, Paint Shop Pro reduces the image’s magnification accordingly.

Display and Caching Tab

PRESENTATION - Checking the Remember last type used for save as is handy when you are saving several different files in a certain format. If you use the batch conversion tool though you will NOT want to have this checked. Display all color dropper tool tips means that when you mouse over something a " tool tip" pop up will appear with some sort of "reminder" information to help you remember what the tool is used for or what the tool is, the tool tip varies from tool to tool. Show pen tool handles will show all the vector handles when working on a raster layer. Use precise cursors and Show brush outlines  will show the outlines of your brushes for instance when you are using them so that you see the actual shape of it as you work.
Caching- Merged image

  Palettes

COLOR PALETTE- You can display the HSL and RGB color values in decimal or hexadecimal format. Because Web browsers use the hexadecimal format, you may prefer to display it when you are creating images  for  the Web. Paint Shop Pro also displays the hexadecimal value of colors.
ALLOW DOCKING OF- This is pretty straight forward, when I had your first start your PSP you notice that most palettes were docked, meaning they were " stuck to the wall in PSP" so to speak, uncheck any palettes that you do NOT want to be dockable.

BROWSER

THUMBNAIL SIZE- This controls the size of your thumbnail images that you see when using the image browser located in PSP. Set the width and height to the size you are comfortable with and I, personally always leave the symmetric checked, otherwise your image thumbs can tend to take on funny shapes.
APPEARANCE-By default the browser will be using the standard windows color of white to show a selected thumbnail. To use a different color select the "Use Classic Colors", click the selection color box and select a new color. When you select Display flat style thumbnails PSP will show them flat looking instead of with a raised outer edge border. When you select "Save Browser Files to Disk" each time your browse an image folder with your PSP Image browser PSP will leave behind a cache file so that the next time you browse that file the images will be cached already and load faster. Sometimes it is necessary to delete these files if you DO save them when you add images after already being browsed once so that they new images will appear. Automatically update the thumbnails is used when you browse, it will either read and display the cached file OR compare the file to the already cached file.  Personally I leave unchecked because sometimes these files will take up a lot of space.

 

MISC. TAB

RECENT FILES- This is the list of files that you have most recently had open that you can see and then also easily open again from the bottom of the text FILE menu. You can set any number up to 10 that you would like to show up.  Use XX% of Tolerance to bg-  when pasting an image as a transparent selection PSP adds it to the current image, defines it as a selection, and then deselects all the pixels that match the current background color.  The Tolerance number you enter determines how closely the bg color must be to match the color to become transparent. Confusing right now I know, you will understand later and can always, like with any preferences we are setting here today change later.  (O being NO tolerance and 100 being complete-all pixels selected) Clipboard data on Exit- Gives you the option to automatically Delete what is left on there, "Ask" meaning it will ask if you want to leave it or delete it, or Leave, meaning that it will leave the contents on clipboard so that you can use with another proggie if you like.  *Note- Leaving items on clipboard will consume memory. Force Full redraw.. When you select this  check box, Paint Shop Pro redraws the information in the active window whenever you move objects in the image. Show Splash Screen... Removing the check from this box will allow PSP to start a tad quicker and you won't have to sit through the Splash screen screen.  Disable Pressure support... A puck-type pointing device is used with a graphics tablet.  Some of these have the same pressure sensitive feature as the graphics pens. When using the pen you can vary the pressure you apply to the tablet to control the opacity, color, or line width. When you select this option, the pressure sensitive feature is not available.

UNITS TAB

RULERS- Display units, from here you can choose whether you want to display your ruler units in Pixels, Inches or centimeters. You first must have your rulers turned on (which I HIGHLY recommend), to do so go to VIEW>RULERS. See examples rulers on and off. The Black on white Vs. Toolbar Colors Options allows you to choose the colors of your rulers, the Toolbar colors will show them as the rest of your toolbars appear , the black and white shows them in simple black and white.  See examples-  Black and White Rulers --  Toolbar Colored Rulers. Default Resolution in PSP 8 will be set to 200, If you are going to be working mostly with web images I suggest that you change this to 72 since that is what web browsers read.

TRANSPARENCY TAB

GRID SIZE- This will control the size of your transparency grid (preview on the right side of your screen).  Default is set to medium, try changing them around to the other settings and see if any of the others are more comfy for you.  GRID COLORS- Are simply the colors of the "checkerboard" transparency layer that you will see in your image, you may change these colors by clicking the color swatches or selecting a preset up color scheme from the drop down list.

WARNINGS TAB

WARNINGS- This is really for the more advanced user that knows when "warnings" are going to appear in certain operations. I would suggest leaving these checked until you are more familiar with the program and then as you use each tool or function in psp and find that certain ones annoy the beeejeeebies out of you, then, at that time you can come back and uncheck them. Take a few moments to read through them if you can so that you will have an idea of exactly what they are and when you might see them.

AUTO ACTIONS TAB

AUTO ACTION PROMPTS- These are similar to the warnings above but give you the option of -Never, Always and Prompt before taking the actions, sometimes when performing an operation another action is required by PSP PRIOR to doing the one that you have requested, for instance, when applying a filter to an image, if the image is only 256 in colors, the filters will not apply and a dialog will appear telling you that the image needs to be at least 16 million in color before the filter action can be preformed, with these preferences you can set it to "prompt " you to change to the 16 million in color, or to Always do whatever it needs to do to perform the operation requested, in this case, promote to 16 million in colors.

Hopefully this tutorial will help to give you an idea on how to get started with your preferences in PSP and what they mean. The next thing for "Getting Started" efficiently with PSP would be to set up a workspace and customize your toolbars.  Sooooooo , let's head over to that section and get started on setting up a workspace that is comfortable for you!!   Or head back to Newbieville and select another area that you may need help in!

If you have any questions in regards to this page and setting your preferences please feel free to email me!!