Software Review of:
Paint Shop Pro 
5.03 

 That's when I installed and started playing with the CD of Paint Shop Pro 5.0 I'd bought after Jasc Software Inc.'s presentation at our Alamo PC monthly meeting in October of 1998. I then checked their Web site www.jasc.com to see what of interest or importance might be there. For starters, I found an easily downloadable upgrade to version 5.03. Later, I went back to soak up the Design Studio features and the tutorials. They also offer a free downloadable, timed usage demo version of PSP. 

 Based on my experience with other programs' users guides, I didn't bother looking at the one which shipped with the CD. As I discovered later, this was a big mistake because, beginning on page 249, there is a excellent interactive tutorial using editable images from the CD and step-by-step instructions from the PSP Users Guide. As someone who thought a "mask" was something seen a lot at Carnival revelries in the South American countries we'd visited . . .that a "filter" was something that needed changing regularly in cars. . .that a "layer" was something that a wild animal in Southern states lived in, I could have flattened the learning curve a bit by at least meandering through the Table of Contents. But, live and learn! 

 And learn I have! I've discovered an Internet full of devoted PSP users, many offering free "how-to-do-this" instructions to get professional results using specific features - and there are enough features to keep me going well into my dotage! In my remaining space in this article, I'll share a bit of what I've learned so far, with credit for the "how to" going to Julie Altstatt, User Group Coordinator for Jasc Software, Inc. (In addition to developing blue-ribbon software, Jasc provides the best support I've ever seen.) I took a nighttime shot of Balinese folk dancer and cruise ship MS Noordam steward Widodo. He is playing the part of Hindu Princess Shinta in the Indonesian Crew Show. In the original photo the red spotlight on Widodo's gold and white costume cast an eerie, pink glow on his face and garb. 

I also took a shot of the Children's Cemetery on one of history's most notorious penal colonies, Devil's Island. The landscape is springtime green, forming a lush backdrop to the aging limestone tombstones. 

 I transformed Widodo from a classic Ramayanan Epic dancer to a smaller, ghostly apparition flitting through the now virtually deserted burial ground. 

 We achieved the transformation by opening both photos and then reducing Widodo's by going to Image-Resize, with settings of 25% by 25%. Working with that photo, I picked the Selection Tool that looks like a lasso and chose Smart Edge from the available options in the Control box. 

I then selected Widodo from the image by going around it with the mouse. [This took some practice on my part and makes me wonder if there is a device which provides better control than a mouse!] This selected part of the image becomes outlined [it's called a "marquee"] and can now be manipulated in a variety of ways. This time I wanted - in effect - to "paste" the smaller version of Widodo on top of the Children's Cemetery image. 

 To do this, I went to Edit-Copy and then clicked the Cemetery photo Back to Edit I went, this time to Edit-Paste-As New Layer. Here, Julie stopped me from blundering into a wrong choice: as I said a few paragraphs above, I wasn't all that sure what the term "layer" meant and I was about to go astray. But, to quote her: "You will be working on the new layer. Don't change to background. The layer you are working with will look like a depressed button in the Layer Toolbox." Whew! Eternal Gratitude! Learning curve flattened a bit more! 

 Making Widodo ethereal meant going to Color-Adjust>Hue/Saturation/Lightness and playing with the lever on the Lightness bar until he looked ghostly enough. At Julie's direction I went to Image-Effects-Motion Blur and turned the dial until Widodo looked properly "flitting." (Frankly, at my stage of newbie-ness I wouldn't have thought of this although I had previously clicked my way through zillions of PSP possibilities looking for the Muse of the Artistically Challenged to appear in spirit-guide form!) 

All that remained was to position him on the Children's Cemetery photo, click on Color-Grayscale and save the image for posterity. 

If something goes wrong along the editing way, the Undo feature is right there on the Toolbar. It's easily configurable to meet your own particular needs for levels of undoing. 

 I'm out of space but definitely not out of enthusiasm. Paint Shop Pro 5.03 is an awesome product for manipulating and editing images professionally from Web page and presentation graphics to the family electronic photo album.