Skinning Tutorial
{EH}Bond3064
This is a tutorial about using Paint Shop Pro 5.0 - 5.3 for newbies.  You can get a FREE trial version from Download.com
Please don't take the time to take this tutorial if you don't have time or patience, skinning can be meticulous and repetitive, meaning you do the same thing over and over again, if you don't like to wait skinning isn't your thing.
Chapter 1: The Tools

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The cursor:
This is your basic item, you can move windows and minimize or maximize them.  Nothing art wise though.


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Magnifying glass:
enlarges image where you click.

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Paint brush: The paint brush will be one of your favorite tools once you learn the size, opacity, and hardness.  You can fool around with these factors by yourself, and when you feel you have a good paint brush, try it out on a skin.  My brush consists of the size 1-6 and opacity and hardness at 100.  A brush size 1-6 means you're always in control for precision, which is great when you are working on skins, which means more detail, which means better skins.


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Lasso: The lasso has three main modes, freehand, point to point, and smart edge.  I don't recommend using any of the selections but point to point.  Freehand is to easy to screw up on, and allows for little or no mistakes.  Smartedge doesn't seem that smart all the time, and is usually cursed at instead of using it.  Point to point is you soluction, when you zoom in you can get every pixel of the image, and make it look like it was cropped, paste it into your skin, with little or no white stuff.


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Shape Select, Eyedropper, and Eraser:  The shape select is kinda like the lasso, with a few obvious differences. No precision and it, well, takes the form of shapes.  Using the rectangle is the only shape you'll use, if you use this tool.  Eyedropper is a great tool for taking colors off of logos and getting pitch black, storing it into your first available color slot.  The eraser is a simplistic tool, erasing all layers, eventually getting to the invisible layer.  I think you can handle it.

Move on to Chapter 2.