Paint Shop Pro v.9  - Preparing your Photographs for the Web -
a beginner's guide.

By Eleanor T. Culling
www.eleanorstravels.com

If you've read any of my other articles or tutorials you know that I don't believe that you have to have the latest, full version of Photoshop to prepare your photos well for use on web pages. Sure, if you are going to be really serious about about making prints you'll want Photoshop, even the latest CS version.  For the web I've been recommending Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop Elements II and Ulead's Photo Impact.
Once I have the 'workspace' customized, I've found PSP to be the easiest to work with and I'll show you why. I thought version 8 was wonderful, and you can do very well with it, but version 9 just came out and that's what I'll be using here. You'll find little that's different at least for the basics! I hope your browser allows you to click on the thumbnails to see the larger screenshots that I have prepared. Some are in the 50kb range and some are up closer to 100 kb ... I want you to be able to see the dialog box well ... so please be patient with the load time if you're using a dial-up as I am. The photos I'll be using were shot early in September while I was running some tests with a new digital camera.

Click on the thumbnails below for larger, better versions.

Yes, this exposure has been influenced
too much by that bright sky.
Let's see what we can do with it.

My 'finished' version is much better... I hope you agree.

For starters, here's the 'workspace' I've set up.

And here it is with one of the dialog boxes open and positioned so that you can see it as well as the photo. Be sure that you depress the one (left of the two) button permanently and click the right hand button on and off while you are looking at the photo, not the dialog box! This is very important but seems to be difficult for some.

Before going any further let's see what PSP's One Step Photo Fix will do for another photo I took in that area. You'll find it as the first choice under the Adjust menu drop down.

Quite dull and lifeless!
The color balance is just plain too cool.

A wonderful result with the click of one button. I suggest you try it first almost every time.

Another striking example of how well the One Step Auto Fix works. I'd still like to pull out more details in the shadow areas though.

Just too dark! I love to shoot rock outcrops as well as landscapes.

That's better, we can see into the showdows and a bit of color saturation has been added as well.

Your first job is to crop your photograph correctly*. I happened to like mine just the way it came out of the camera but let's get in closer to the tree on the hill and make it verticle rather than horizontal. If you're preparing photos for the web you want to crop fairly closely so load time is not slowed down by too much image. Use the cropping tool and 'pull down' from the top left to begin.
* The crop tool is over on the left (see the workspace above).

Here's my own custom photo tool bar. See p. 56 in your manual and be sure to
choose carefully and put them in the proper order. Go to HELP, Index, type in "customizing" and choose Toolbars, then 'Creating a New Toolbar'. Read the 'Customining Toolbars' link within the Creating a New toolbar article. This is a frustrating task but well worth the time you take to accomplish it. It will save you a huge amount of time later because the tool choices are essentially in the order you will use them. Using the drop down menus below Image, Effects and Adjust is an even slower way to work.

From left to right: Resize, Normal viewing (full size after the Resize), Auto-fix, Histogram adjustment, Brightness/contrast, Auto color balance, Auto saturation, Clarify, Unsharp mask and finally the JPEG optimizer.
Once you have it set up move it to the place shown above in the workspace example.

On to page 2 where I'll show you how to use these tools.