Use PaintShop Pro Faster

Use PaintShop Pro Faster

View the youtube video on this tutorial:  How to use PSP Faster

In this tutorial we'll cover a number of different ways to speed up your workflow in PaintShop Pro.  I'm willing to bet that there will be some that you are already familiar with, but my hope is that at least one of these methods will be new for you. 

Shortcuts

The first accelerant is using shortcuts keys.  These already exist and it's simply a matter of learning them and beginning to use them.  If a shortcut key already exists, when you hover over the tool (or view the menu item) you'll see the shortcut key next to the tool name.   If you want to be comprehensive you can google for image maps of all the default shortcuts available in PaintShop Pro.

You can set your own custom shortcuts by right-clicking on any toolbar, and selecting the Keyboard tab on the dialog box. 

In this window you can select what Category and specifically what Command you want to shortcut.  You can add or update any command here to shortcuts that work best for you.  My preference would be to put the tools I use most all on the left-hand portion of the keyboard since my right hand will be tied up with the mouse.

Scripting

Scripting is a way to execute a set of commands in sequence automatically on an image.  The script can be recorded based on your own actions, or they can be downloaded or purchased from online.  There are many videos and tutorials for how to make the most of scripting which you can explore, I just want to mention it here.

Creating a script and running it whenever you want is great, but let's say you want to apply this effect on multiple images.  You can do with with Batch Processing.  This feature can be initiated in the menu File > Batch Process.  In this dialog you can add a group of photos, then select a script to run on all those images.

Once you select all the images and choose the script, you can set some output settings, and click [Start].  PaintShop Pro will now apply this script to all the selected images, saving you a whole lot of time.  This can be great for applying effects to video (which I'll cover in a later tutorial).

Copying Edits

Let's say you have a set of changes that you applied to a single image.  Now, let's say that you have a handful of other images you want to apply these changes to, but you didn't create a script.  You can simply copy the edits from this first image to other images.  To do this follow these steps:

• Save your first image
• Change PaintShop Pro to the Manage window
• Right-click on the first image and choose Capture Editing

• Now select all the images you want to apply the changes to
• Right-click and choose Apply Editing
• Changes will sequentially be applied to all the selected images

Note that this only works under the following conditions:

• Don't close PaintShop Pro anywhere in the process above
• Don't move any of the images during the process above
• Original image can't have been edited via this method (can't chain the effect)

Presets

Next is presets.  This is a common one that I often don't take advantage of as much as I could.  Essentially nearly all tools with settings allows you to save the configuration as a preset.  An example of this could be using Layer Properties.  I often use drop shadows for different layers, and if I create a preset with the type of shadow I need, I don't have to manually set all those settings each time I want to create the same effect.  I just choose the Preset.

Once you have your settings where you like them, you can click the icon below (yellow arrow indicated) to save those settings as a preset.

Custom Toolbars

The final tip is creating custom toolbars.  PaintShop Pro gives has a lot of well organized tools available for you in their standard toolbars.  However, let's say you do a lot of vector graphics drawing.  There aren't many toolbar icons available for those operations.

To create a custom tool bar first right-click any toolbar and select Customize.  In this view select the Toolbars tab.  Click [New] and a give the toolbar a name.  At this stage you should be able to find this blank toolbar floating around somewhere.

On the Customize dialog, change to the Commands tab.  In this view, you can now drag any of the Commands icons into your toolbar, and build your own custom toolbar.  You can see an example of my custom vector graphics toolbar below.

As a side bonus, if on the Customize dialog you choose the Scripts tab.  Here you can [Bind] a script to one of the generic icons.  Then, you can drag that icon into your custom toolbar.  So now in this way, you can create your own script, and have it available in a toolbar if you want to get access to it very quickly.

Conclusion

So that's it.  In summary you can see that there are numerous methods in PaintShop Pro to remove repetition and cumbersome click operations to make things go faster.  I like this because it allows me to focus on being creative rather than remembering the many different clicks and drags necessary to achieve something I've done before.  Hope this helped you.