| Fun with Paint Shop Pro 8 and 9 Transformations | |
(If you arrived on this page from a search, click here to begin the tutorial from page 1.)
Activate the Pen Tool and look at the Tool Options palette. Make sure that, in the Mode panel, you have Edit selected by clicking the arrow icon. When you activate the Pen tool, you'll notice that the bounding box has disappeared from the selected Star Shape, replaced by nodes and line segments. This is how you node edit in PSP8. Once in edit mode, you can select and move nodes in much the same fashion as you did in PSP7, but you can do much more.
Right-click, choose Edit from the drop-down menu and select
All from the submenu. Now you can do some vector transformations. Go to the
Transformation panel on the right of the palette and pick Duplicate selected
from the drop-down. This will make another copy of the selected nodes and lay
them down as a new contour, as part of the same path or object. The two numerical
fields allow you to offset the new nodes from the location of the originals:
A positive value in the Duplication X field will move them to the right that
number of pixels, a negative value left; and in the Duplication Y field, they
move down with a positivr value and up with a negative value. Enter 0 in both
fields and click the Check mark icon 
at the right of the fields to apply.
You'll notice the nodes are now represented by little crosses with circles around them. This is how PSP lets you know that you have two nodes at the same place. When you do a Duplicate selected, the old nodes are deselected and only the new ones are selected. Activate the Transformation drop-down again and choose Rotate with a value of 10 in the Rotation field. This will rotate the selected nodes 10° clockwise. You can enter values from -180 to 180 in this field: Negative values rotate counterclockwise, positive values clockwise.
