PSP 8 Materials Pallette Basics

PSP 8 Materials/Colour Pallette Tutorial

Just the Basics

The terms of use are here>

PSP 7's Colour Pallette is now PSP 8's Materials Pallette. The top looks like this:

After clicking on the Flood-fill tool

you can pick a colour from the upper chart. If you click on the S, you can pick swatches (designs) to fill your selection with. However, this is very hard to see, and there's a much easier way.

The bottom of the pallette looks like this:

Although you can click on any of those little boxes--gradient, etc., I think the easiest way to use the Materials Pallette is to click on the Foreground or Background boxes (F and B in the image), depending on which you want to change. (When you wish to turn off the foreground or background, just click on the familiar circle with the line going through it.)

There is a funny little symbol between the Foreground and Background boxes that looks like this

. If you click on one of the teeny arrows, the Foreground and Background colours will be switched.

ALL TOOLS BOX - You can see it at the bottom of the image above. If you have the box checked, the Foreground and Background colours/materials will not change when you go from one tool to another.

If the box is not checked, for instance and you used blue and green with your Flood-fill

tool, and then went to the Airbrush Tool, the foreground and background would show the colours you last used for the Airbrush, not the blue and green. (Thanks to LindaMarie.)

Getting the Full Menu
When you click on one of the boxes (Foreground or Background), a full menu pops up:

There are three tabs at the top--Color, Gradient, and Pattern. Each tab brings up a new menu for, guess what?, Color, Gradient and Pattern.

Solid Colours

On the bottom there is a box that says HTML--that is where you put the HTML number of your colour, or you can insert the RGB numbers the little boxes up left, or pick from the colour chart.

The H, S, and L boxes are for adjusting Hue, Saturation, and Lighten. So, for instance, if you picked your colour and think it's a little too dark or light, you can just click on the larger down arrow in the L box and a slider will pop up. Just slide up or down to make your colour darker or lighter.

Gradients

To set the gradients, click on the Gradient tab up top and you get this:

You can choose which gradients you want by clicking on Box 1, because a menu with all your gradients will pop up and you can slide up and down to choose one.

The Styles Box lets you pick one of four styles--Linear, Rectangular, Sunburst, or Radial. You don't have to "memorise" these--as your cursor goes over them, their names appear.

EDIT PATHS BUTTON - this is a nice feature which saves your from going to File - Preferences - File Locations. From this box you can direct PSP to any folder that has gradients in it. This is very useful if you have gradients which you do not use often. If you are doing a tutorial, and think you may never use the gradient again, you don't have to install it under PSP, since you can access it with the Edit button.

Patterns

This menu is pretty obvious. If you click on the box (with the bricks in this example), all your patterns will pop up. Note, too that there is an Edit Paths button so you can easily find patterns in other folders. The Angle box lets you angle your pattern diagonally, or any way you like, and the Size button lets you make the pattern larger or smaller.

Textures

You reach this menu by clicking on the Foreground or Background box. Once again, clicking on the image in the box brings up a menu with all your textures.

Note the Edit Paths button that lets you easily access patterns in other folders.

The Add to Swatches button lets you save any patterns/swatches you make.

You can also access your swatches by clicking on the little box that looks like two windows, but the pop-up is very small!

Alert!--When you are through with the Textures, uncheck the Texture box at the top, or all of your future Flood-fills will be textured!

That's the end of Materials Pallette 101 and I hope you found it useful.

If you have any questions or comments, our email contact is here.