How To: Make a Graphic with PSP

Paint Shop Pro, a.k.a. PSP, is a great program that can be used to make animated or non-animated graphics. You could display these graphics on your personal website, print graphics for your scrapbook, create an avatar for online message boards, or well, use them for countless other things. You get the idea - a lot can be done with PSP and with a little practice, you can make some awesome graphics. Here's how, step by step.

First things first - you need to decide what kind of graphic you want to create. There are hundreds of websites that offer what PSP refers to as "picture tubes". Picture tubes, simply put, are graphics. You can find just about anything under the sun from A - Z. Graphics can be found by doing a search for picture tubes in any search engine. An additional resource is available with this article, which is a picture tube website that offers hundreds of links to picture tube sites, as well as an alphabetical library of categories.

Almost every picture tube you download from the internet will need to be "unzipped" using WinZIP. Downloads of WinZIP are available online, found by searching for it in a search engine. Tutorials are also available to guide you through unzipping an item, if you don't already know how. When you unzip your newly downloaded graphics, unless you change it otherwise, your newly unzipped graphics will be put into a folder entitled Unzipped in My Documents.

Once your picture tube is unzipped, you'll need to load it into PSP. Doing that is easy. First, open PSP and let it load. Once it's loaded, click File-Open and find your unzipped picture tube. When it appears on the screen, click File-Export and on the side menu for export, click on Picture Tube. A small menu will come up that has a text box in the bottom right corner. Type a name for your picture tube in that box, click OK, and voila, your picture tube is now loaded into PSP.