Tutorial for Paint Shop Pro Photo

Paint Shop Pro is very useful for editing photos, if you know how to use it.

If you're using a digital camera to take pictures, complementing your camera with some photo editing software makes sense. Along with other editors on the market, Paint Shop Pro offers many useful tools for photo editing and touch-ups, helping you get the most out of your digital camera's pictures. This piece of software can be confusing if you've never used it before, but with a few basic steps you can learn the essentials.

Instructions

1. Open Paint Shop Pro and click on the "File" menu, located in the top left-hand corner of the screen.

2. Find the digital photo that you want to edit with Paint Shop Pro and click on the file to select it.

3. Click "Open." The image should appear in the center of the Paint Shop Pro interface.

4. Click on the "Express Lab" icon near the top of the Paint Shop Pro screen. The Express Lab icon contains a square and two arrows, one pointing to the left and one to the right. The icon is just to the right of the "Zoom In" button. According to Corel, the company that makes Paint Shop Pro, the Express Lab tool lets users quickly fix the most common types of photo flaws. Advanced editing is also possible with other tools. But for a first-time user, the Express Lab option works best. After clicking on the icon, several options will appear on screen for photo editing.

5. Adjust the sliders on the right-hand side of the Express Lab interface if you want to change the photo's brightness, shadows, highlights or saturation. Instead of clicking on the sliders, you can also click on the numerical value next to each photo characteristic and then type in a new value, according to Corel. If you are unhappy with your changes to the photo, you can return brightness, shadows, highlights and saturation to their original appearance by inserting "0" in each box or by returning the sliders to the middle.

6. Click on the red-eye removal button, indicated with an icon of a human eye, if you want to remove red-eye glare in your images.

7. Click on the touch-up button, indicated by a makeup brush, if you need to smooth out certain elements within the pictures. The touch-up button is useful for airbrushing skin imperfections or getting rid of unwanted background items. Click and drag your cursor over the unwanted area for an instant touch-up. If a touch-up does not turn out as you wanted, you can undo the touch-up by pressing the "Ctrl" key and the "Z" key at the same time.

8. Click on the crop tool, found just to the left of the touch-up button, if you want to cut off parts of the image or resize the picture.

9. Click "File" again and then select "Save" when you've finished using Paint Shop Pro's Express Lab editing tools.

References

• Corel: Paint Shop Pro Overview
• Corel: Get to know the Express Lab