Cleaning and Typesetting

I don’t know what it is but I get super distracted by learning about software. This week I have gotten pretty intimate with my art program: Paint Shop Pro 9. Not to be confused with Photoshop, this is the Corel competitive software. Now, I’ve done a fair bit of playing with PSP9 before. I like to take Yahoo Avatars and make invisible men for Frank’s Facebook profile picture. This involves a whole lot of screen captures including turning on something that is difficult for Yahoo Avatars to load so that the avatar box is empty for a few seconds and I can get the background. (The headless ghost works best for that)

Very little of it do I have to redraw…the back of his empty shirt, sometimes the empty sleeves or if the hand is in front of the torso, then a little bit of that too. The clone tool works great for that. Probably the one I changed the most is the Elizabethan one because I wanted it to look like his Greenwood costume.

This week, on one of my manga Yahoo Groups, a request for cleaners and typesetters came out. No experience is necessary! So I thought…cleaning a scanned newsprint page of manga and adding text would be an excellent way to learn PSP9 better. So I volunteered. It wasn’t a huge commitment. I would be cleaning maybe 5 pages on the 5th and 20th of the month when the newsprint version of the manga is released. The major bonus has been that the person in charge has been writing up these long descriptions of how to do it in Photoshop…from that point I end up searching my program like crazy to find the PSP9 equivalent of whatever she was describing at the time. As a result…boy have I learned PSP9!

I do have a few gripes for PSP9 now though…Leveling…Photoshop makes this nice graph that you can move the selection in to. PSP9 makes a bar slider that’s much harder to manage:

But I should hardly be complaining. I never used Levels before this point. It’s all good.