Daniel Hess

A Day late but took some extra time with the day 4 entry; trying to practice some of the "lessons" LOL. No real stories spelled out. I also played A LOT of baseball in my youth but although there are a lot of photos in my parent's photo albums, I somehow never actually scanned any of those. I'll be going back to IOWA for a wedding next month and if I get to spend some time in the old house, I might peek into all those albums and see about taking some more memories out of them. That's my granddaughter (who is now going on 17 years old) with the fishing pole, the first time she went out in the boat with me.

@Cassel Yes, I got your response. In the original email, something must have glitched in the email when it came in. I kept getting page not available responses but apparently that was only here. On a side note again, my post yesterday about the yearbooks and old photos..."back in the day" when I was working on those, I was using the Jasc PSP 3 and later 4 versions and didn't know ANYTHING yet about what could truly be done with them. I haven't had EVERY in between version but can pretty much say have owned most of them up to XI then about 2018 and on.

I sent it via the contact me email link also but the Day 4 template link is broken in the email and browser view. Thanks. Note, I found it in the Diamond Members area under workshops but doubt all have access to that.

@Cassel I try to be very careful when resizing. A LOT of my photos are very old and were scanned many years ago when storage was very expensive and in short supply. I cut a lot of corners by resizing down, "proportionally" in 99 percent of the cases, and moving the compression slider down towards the lower quality side. So like you said in your article, sometimes I even have made myself cringe a little bit. Huge case in point...I did the yearbooks for my high school in Spain for every year it was in existence and posted them online. Folks from all era's sent me either the yearbook (or a zerox copy in the case of most of the pre 1970 books) and I pretty much wore out a flatbed scanner working on that project. This was back when we were using dial up modems so storage wasn't the only issue...page loading time was also important. Each page was originally HUGE after being scanned then I killed quality trying to optimize for loading times and storage. You can see those pages at www.toroscope.com which is my yearbook site. I remember the standard I set was 600 width and 765 height (pixels) and the real crime was moving the quality slide down to keep the images in the 25 to 70 KByte range. My personal photos when I scanned from my parent's photo albums back in those early days were much the same. As you said, sizing down is easy with a lot of forgiveness possible but it's very hard sometimes to size up.

Day 3.

Not really an event but our visits and get togethers over the years were recurring and memorable events. When we lived in Spain, my parents flew my grandparents over and they got to experience a little bit of Europe and visit with the family.

I threw something together for this one. Not especially good but it's got some things from high school years.

@Ann Seeber Maybe search the "documents" folder for USA-MAP.PspShape and see where it landed. Apparently NOT in the documents/Corel Paintshop Pro/2023/Preset Shapes folder. ??? I don't have 2023...I didn't see anything that tripped my trigger better than 2022 but am ANXIOUSLY awaiting to see what 2024 is going to bring. I figure the best of 2023 will also be included in that. Punctuation is KEY in the file names and folder names...you miss one capital letter and it will give you nothing.

@Ann Seeber @Mary Solaas @Corrie Kinkel OK. Need to lose the period that ended up in the link at the end. Let me try again. http://www.toroscope.com/files/USA-MAP.zip Better to copy and paste the link in the address bar. When I tried on my reply, it gave me something about unsecure download. Should work fine just typing it in or pasting it. OR BEST...right click then "Save link as" from this post.

@Mary Solaas @Corrie Kinkel You can get the pspshape file here: http://www.toroscope.com/files/USA-MAP.zip. I warn you...it wasn't done as elegantly as it could have been...if you load it up and look at the vectors there are ALOT of objects throughout the thing and I wasn't completely methodical i.e. start in upper left and work all the way across then down some and again etc. I kind of jumped around until I had all the borders. PS...remember Carole's lesson on file types regarding this...just unzip and put the pspshape file into documents/CorelPSP/Preset Shapes folder.

I'm now wondering what painting with paintbrush with "Lock" tool is all about. Didn't see anything like that in the PSP help topics.

Added the states to my USA pre-set shape. I'm happy with it.

Totally enjoyed this workshop. Gonna do a diamond membership for a few months and try to pick up some of the classes and information available for PSP. My next project already started is to do a preset shape of a USA map. I guess to do state borders internal to the closed vector path, you just select the lines (vs edit) with pen tool and put them in seperate. I'll find out if that is just a folly in my mind LOL.

Carole, on the "invisible" question, I don't believe so...it disappeared when I CUT it from the base image and showed up for final repositioning after pasting. It just (many times) did NOT paste the cutout (transparent) into the original vector. The "undo" to the Reverse Path command with a new Reverse Path inserted in the process worked. I'm sure I have been doing something wrong but the only thing I can think is using the "Select None" after creating a selection to change multiple nodes to Symmetrical...I couldn't seem to get it back into edit mode any other way. Anyhow, I finished the 16 cups rendition AND some of them with additional cutouts. Also Lessons 6 and 7. I did NOT do the text part of that...I just went for a real complex "cut with knife" thing on a circle using a compass layer to divide it equally into 4 parts. Here are the results.

If you tried to edit it after already "exporting it", then exported it again, you may have to shut down your PSP and restart it because the "new" exported version wasn't re-uploaded into the preset shapes...if that makes sense. I had that happen to myself...made a change and it didn't show up when I tested it as a preset shape. Then I "reloaded" the preset shapes, the changed version was in there. OR (and I didn't try this), maybe selecting and using one of the other tools then selecting preset shapes again will reload the shapes without having to shut down completely.

@Cassel and everyone else as well. Going back to the 16 cups file, I have found that OFTEN, after doing the cutout, then pasting it into the vector, the cutout doesn't happen i.e. I do NOT get the transparent section in the cup handle. Then I start using the undo step by step until the NEXT undo is the Reverse Path command. If at that point I go into the cutout section and select Reverse Path AGAIN, then select all, cut, then paste into the vector, IT WORKS. I don't know what I've been doing that "already" reverses the path before I try to do it on the first attempt but somehow, when my initial reverse path is invoked, the path was already reversed (apparently...if doing it a second time makes it work). Anyhow...I'm now up to "Multicup07" preset shape in the cups file. I have also a couple of times tried to get fancy and paste a second cutout into one of the vectors but that hasn't been working. When I'm done with the 16 cups, I'll go back and tackle that and figure out how to make it work.

OK...I have done Lesson 5. Here is my submission.

I was running into that as well. I did the right click on the vector path, then edit, then "select none". As long as you are in edit mode on your pen tool at top, you should be back to editing nodes.

OK. Doing "ONE" object/cup and changing the stroke width to 10 (from 5) actually worked. I still do not know what I was doing wrong when using the whole cup file. I'll take the "win" and might go back and try the big file again. Originally was going to see if could make a shape file with multiple preset shapes as per lesson two from a few of these.

I am going to take just one of the cups in its own file and try it that way. If that doesn't work, I'll look at getting loom set up. Right now the "layer" view is very small on the screen and I'm not sure how to zoom just that...but the vectors will show up much "larger" in the view I have after I go to just one of the cups in its own file.

I honestly don't know what I'm doing wrong at this point. I've deleted everything and gone back the drawing board and followed along step by step with Lesson 4, pausing the video with each step. It "cuts" the cutout vector and I can paste it into the "cup" vector and reposition it but the cutout is filled when I check it. The only thing different is that I'm working on the original canvas of many cups and started with the upper left one. The vectors are in the layers palette and show up on the canvas and when I switch to fill AND stroke its all there except the cutout is NOT cut out. GRRRR !!! To the best of my knowledge I'm set up exactly as Caroline was in the video for the pen tool. The image below is what I have right after I paste the cutout into the main cup vector and reposition it. The "test" fails (so far) every time.

Lesson 4 "Failure". Haven't figured out where it went wrong but the "cutout" isn't truly "cutting out" for me. Maybe I missed one of those double node merges but I didn't see any to merge. At any rate I should be seeing transparency in the handle after using the Preset Shape I exported and it is filling just like the main cup. The dog is pestering me for his walk and he won't let me concentrate on anything else until that "ritual" has been observed. As of September last year, we had 3611 (and change) miles logged with my Garmin watch (since Nov 2016) and have done a couple or more hundred since September. He is almost 11 and we won't have him for too much longer...he is a large doberman...getting gray and he runs out of steam early after commencing our walks these days. Pretty much maxing out at 1.5 miles on good days.

Here are Lessons 2 and 3. I ran into a snag...somewhere sometime, I had added the Corel_11 preset shape folders for 2019 to 2022 inclusive to my file locations for Pre-set shapes as well as the "documents/Preset shapes folders for all four years. Whenever I tried to export a new shape, the program locked up tight and refused to work. When looked, the new shape was in the 2022 preset shapes folder so it had saved...but forever and a day I could NOT select preset shapes to try out my new vector...the program locked up tight. Had to Ctrl/Alt/Del and go back in. Finally I compared my preset shapes file locations to others that worked i.e. Picture tubes etc...and the ONLY Corel_"number" folder in those was the current/latest year. When I deleted those file locations for 2019, 2020, and 2021, everything started working again. Woo Hoo ! Anyhow, I'm behind a lesson now...need to do the cutout lesson and whatever is in Lesson 5 (haven't yet looked. )

Not great getting it actually symmetrical editing cusps...that will take some practice.