With Arizona Kate's 'Creative Lettering' tutorial you'll learn to draw your own letters instead of using a font. The 'bubble letter' shapes are all pretty simple to create using the vector tools in Paint Shop Pro. There are many fun uses for these fat, stylized letter shapes and it's also very good node editing practice! You'll also learn how to use the bubble letters as a photo-collage or frame.
• Draw Bubble Letters with Paint Shop Pro

"Screen shot" is the phrase used to describe the action of capturing your computer desktop or anything shown on your computer screen to a static image file. In other words, it is a way of taking a snapshot, or picture, of your computer screen. Some people also call it a screen grab. Screen shots can be very helpful when you need to demonstrate something that would be difficult to explain in words. Learn what you need to know about screen shots and how to take them no matter what operating system you use.
• What is a Screen Shot? How do I Take a Screen Shot?

Adding a visible watermark is a common way of identifying images and protecting them from unauthorized use online. Learn how to create an effective watermark and apply it to your digital photos or art work.
• What is a Watermark? How Do I Watermark my Digital Images?

One of Paint Shop Pro's popular painting tools is the Picture Tube, commonly called 'Tubes'. With a small collection of Tube files (*.tub) you can create a tube painting . In this tutorial, Arizona Kate shows you how to create a 'Summer Cottage' landscape painting with a few tubes you probably already have. Along the way, she'll show you a few artistic tricks to fine tune your tubes to add more interest and depth to your painting.
• Summer Cottage Tube Painting Paint Shop Pro Tutorial
• What Are Picture Tubes?

This week's graphics challenge theme is Boats, suggested by John (aka MT_Pockets). We gave the theme our twist, and the goal is to create a new image using elements of at least three of the starting images supplied. So climb aboard and sail away with your nautical image! Read more...

Adobe Photoshop is the standard for graphic editing and photo retouching. This also means that the number of options and functions it has might overwhelm the user. Photoshop's Print Preview is one of those. Photoshop gives you total control over the print options of your graphics, but knowing what they all mean can be a task, even for the experienced user. This quick rundown of the Print with Preview function of Photoshop will shed some light of the most important printing options.
• Understanding Print Preview in Photoshop

Use Paint Shop Pro tutorial to create a festive banner for Cinco de Mayo with bright Mexican colors and a double outline. The first color outlines each individual letter with a second color outlining the whole word. Additional embellishments can be added to each letter. Of course, this double-outline technique could be used for any message, header or banner, not just Cinco de Mayo!
• Cinco de Mayo Creative Lettering Tutorial for Paint Shop Pro

My father-in-law recently passed away and although I didn't always have the words to say to my husband and his family, I offered to create a slide show for his memorial service. It felt good because it was something I could do for them in such a time of sadness.

Initially, I tried to do the slide show in Adobe Premiere Elements because of the integration with Photoshop Elements, which is what I use for my photo management. Unfortunately, it ran so slow that it was impossible to work with and not having a background with video editing software, the program was not intuitive for me. So I returned to ProShow Gold, the software I had used before to create a 50th anniversary slide show for my parents last year. Read more...

Fairly frequently, I hear from people who need to export standard graphics files from various page layout and design programs that don't offer an export or save option, and only save their files in a proprietary format. In the past, my suggestion for this dilemma was usually to take a screen shot of the document, but that isn't always ideal, especially if you need to export a high resolution file. Until I came across FinePrint; it's a simple and effective solution for this problem!
• Try FinePrint When You Can't Convert

This week's graphics challenge theme is Fabergé Egg. Carl Fabergé was commissioned to create an Easter gift for the Czar's wife. The rest is history as they say. This week's challenge theme is to create your own Fabergé Egg. Get extravagant as you like, and have fun with it! Read more...