Using the Browser

By now you should have an idea of the size of PSP and all of the things that are available to you.  If you aren't sure of anything in PSP and you haven't already, take a look at this tutorial for an overview of everything that is available in the programme.  

This tutorial is going to look at something that I have found to be incredibly useful in PSP.  It's the PSP Browser.  It shows you small pictures (thumbnails) of all the graphics you have in various folders so you can decide more easily which image you want to use.

You will need:

A copy of PaintShop Pro - you can download a 30 day trial version from here

Fire up PSP and wait for it to chug and whir into action

Now go to the "File" menu and click on "Browse" (it may take a while to come up depending on the speed and memory of your computer)

You'll have a screen that looks similar to Windows Explorer come up, with the directory structure of your computer on the left and thumbnails of all the graphics within that folder on the right (I've reduced this screenshot a lot to save space and download time, but hopefully you get the idea?)

I don't usually go any further into the Browser options 'cos this tells me everything I need to know most of the time, but there are a lot of other functions that are available to you and I think it's good to know about them even if you don't use them!  :o)

The main browser window is a brilliant tool to use if you have either a large hard drive or a lot of graphics.  I've got both so I've got into the habit of always opening this up before I do anything else in PSP... it's such an incredible time-saver!  :o)

So, what can you do with it now that you've got this window open?

You can find out the date the image was last saved, how big it is and the type of file (.gif, .jpg, .psp etc) which can really help if you have lots of different versions of similar images.  To find out this information, take your cursor over to an image and just let it hover over it.  A small box will come up with the image details.

The first line tells you the name of your image - this one is called "kisses.gif"

The second line tells you the height, width, colour depth and file size of the image, so this one is 80 pixels wide by 190 pixels high and the colour depth is 256 colours.  The size of the file is 20.7kb

The third line tells you the type of file it is - this one is a CompuServe GIF (more commonly known as just "gif")

The last line tells you the date and time the file was last saved

This will probably be the only information you need about your image, but if not, there is another way to find out a bit more about it.  

If you right click on your image, a pop-out box will come up

Choose the "Information" option and a dialogue box will come up with more technical information about the image.

Right at the very top it tells you the name of your image "kisses.gif"

Then we go to the "Image format" section.  This tells you that it's a gif file and the version of gif that it's saved as (there are 2 versions of .gif files - older programmes will only read version GIF87 but newer programmes will read GIF89a) and it tells you the way that it is set to load up on a webpage - this image is set to load up all at once when the whole file has been downloaded from the server, but you can set it so that it appears on the screen a bit at a time as it is downloaded.