The Wonders of Paint Shop Pro Paintings

I have several of these and it's a wonder what great software can do, I use Paint Shop Pro but there are a few other brands out there. I can paint something kind of, not so good, let me just say I have experimented with quite a few different ways of creating Art (It is a work of Art after I touch it up that is). I'm going to give you the original and I will show you a few changes that can be made to make it look pretty cool, at least to me.

It amazes me, you can make them 3 dimensional, give them more depth, give them more light and many many more things. You will see the second photo, this is the same photo but I have given it a neon glow, changes the painting for the better I would say. You can see some texture in the stems of the flowers and on the grasses.

With the Chrome effect it changes to a whole different picture for me once again. There are so many effects you can choose from, how to take blah to not so shabby with the click of a mouse button. It makes it seem as if the sky has changed drastically and it's a whole new feeling that the piece gives to you. The feeling it gives to me is that a storm is brewing, something ominous is coming.

The fourth picture in line is with the enamel effect and this is one effect you have to play with quite a bit to get the effect that you want. If you have your settings too high it will blend the colors too much into one another, if I recall I did this one with a setting of 10% only so it did not get distorted too much.

The fifth and final one in line is the Glowing Edges effect, course I always seem to be drawn to neon lights like a moth so perhaps this is why it appeals to me so much. If you have paintings that of your own that you are not so thrilled with, take a picture of it, manipulate it with Paint Shop Pro, have it printed out on Quality Photo Paper, Frame it and hang it in a place of honor on your wall... Or better yet you could try to sell it as digital art.

There are a lot of choices for a person to go through, if you take the time and play around a bit with Paint Shop you will most likely find something that appeals to you. You can import your images directly into the software in a variety of different ways, some of those are, scanner, camera, screen capture or Twain. Paint Shop X2 also comes with Corel Media One, a simplified version of Paint Shop. There is an excellent background remover tool included by Image Skill - Background Remover 3, takes a bit of learning but once you have the hang of it you really start enjoying your image manipulating skills.

This was a scanned in colored pen doodle that I have darkened. I seem to have a stronger liking towards the artistic effects that Paint Shop Pro offers. There are many options with your effects; you can posterize, solarize, neon glow, hot wax coating, enamel, colored foil and that is just to name a small portion of them.

There are layers of several different types, to list a few:

• Vectors
• Raster
• Art Media
• Group
• Mask
• Adjustment

The time machine effect is one of my favorite parts of this Corel software package. I think the Time Machine Effect turns out really nice, with this effect you can select which decade you want it to turn into and voila... it has a slider scale for you to choose from in a range of years.

The picture to the right is the shown with the time machine effect. I regret to say I did not keep track of all of my choices and I do not recall which effect I chose for the last recreation of my painting.

The Software

In regards to Corel Paint Shop Pro I do not even know how to do 1/10th of what this software is capable of. I can create graphics from scratch, I think I could even do an animation if I had an idea of how to go about it. There are distortion effects, geometric, artistic, reflection, photo, texture and many more to choose from... and that is only one part of what Paint Shop Pro does.

I forgot to mention you also get picture tubes, you probably do with adobe software too, you can usually get free tubes off the Internet, just have to search around a bit. I used tubes on my Car Show hub, it's the little graphics/pics I put in front of peoples faces and such. I give Corel Paint Shop Pro a Thumbs up, been using it for years.

I have included a couple of screen-shots from Paint Shop Pro just so you can take a look around and see what some of the options are.

• There is a Learning Center included to give you a helping hand.
• You can have several pictures open at one time.
• You can copy one picture into another, mirror it, turn it, warp it, pinch it and many more.
• You can re-size, save as jpeg, bmp, PSPImage (Just to name a few), or you can export with optimization to make the image smaller and more easily usable for email and websites.
• Re-size your image while maintaining your aspect ratio, this is a very helpful feature, stops a person from unintentionally distorting the photo.
• There are several filters to choose from, from aged to modern in the Time Machine
• Work with vectors for fine tuning.