Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Tutorials?

Hey guys! Quick question if you don't mind. I'm relatively new to the photo editing game, and I am obsessed with making my pics look less pixelized and more natural. I've had the hardest time finding any tutorials or info on how to go about this. Does anyone know of any websites that could help me out?

Thanks so much!!

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photopainttutorialsphotos/Photos_Fixes_and_Photo_Effects_in_Corel_PhotoPaint.htm


http://www.huntfor.com/design/tutorials/photopaint.htm

http://www.visionary-voyager.com.au/corel/photopaint/

http://www.pixel2life.com/tutorials/coreldraw_and_corel_photopaint/
You're goin gto have to hunt for what you need, but there are hundreds of these out there.

Paint is a great program and the most recent is wonderful, I have the whole suite.. Love it madly, but am a photoshop user by default..

reducing noise scratches etc.. Also in your photopaint book that come with program there is nice how tos.

Corel maintains newsgroups for all it's products.

news://cnews.corel.com/corel.PaintShopProPhotoX2 is the url for the one you asked about.

Also Corel has tutorials: http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Content/1192639386269 for the PSP Photo.

One of the best things you can do to get rid of the pixelation (as long as you have the hard drive space) before you even head into a graphics program for more editing is to check the High-res Snapshot option. If you don't already have the Advanced menu open, then CTRL+ALT+D will open it, then check that option in the menu.

After that, whenever you take a snapshot to disk (File > Snapshot to Disk. If you click the two lines at the top of the menu you can detach it and move it anywhere on your screen) they will be big (very big; some 3000 or so pixels wide) and very high quality. When you resize them, you'll be able to see the difference: all the jagged edges will be gone.

I took two pics a while ago to illustrate the difference to a friend who asked me the same question. Normal snapshot is on the left, high-res one (resized) is on the right:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/skelldagger/2744260560/sizes/o/

If you haven't done so already, go into your graphics card settings, and assign SL a profile which includes some degree of anti-aliasing. This will get rid of the jagged edges in your view. If they're not there in the first place, they obviously won't be there in the snapshots either.

If you've got the latest viewer, there is an anti-aliasing setting in preferences. Edit -> Preferences -> Graphics tab -> Hardware Options button -> Anti-Aliasing. But it's only got very basic options. Your graphics card's control panel will be far more powerful.

If you've got an nVidia card, you'll find what you need in the nVidia Control Panel, or you can use a third party utility called nHancer, which works really well. If it's an ATI card, then it's the Catalyst Control Center. In either case, be sure to set the profile to override any application settings. If you're running Intel graphics, then your only option is probably the in-world settings.

How much Anti-Aliasing you can safely apply will depend on how good your video card is. The more AA you apply, the better everything will look, but the lower your frame rate will be. To give you an idea, I have dual GeForce 8800GTX's in my desktop. With that, I use 16xQ AA (the maximum possible), and my frame rates barely drop at all. The laptop I had for a while had a GeForce 8600 in it, and the best I could manage with that before the drop in FPS became unacceptable was 8xQ (which is still pretty damned good). You'll find that even 2x will make things look about a hundred times better than they do with no AA at all. A little bit goes a very long way. But obviously, the higher the setting, the better. Experiment to see how much your system can handle.





Skell, just so you know, what you're suggesting can work sometimes, but it's pretty unreliable. Even in the image in your link, there are still jags visible in some areas. Again, the best way to get rid of the jags is just not to have them there in the first place.