If you are one of those people that likes to explore with online money making possibilities using premade websites, templates and scripts, then you just have to learn how to compose and manipulate graphics. Premade websites are a great idea if you want to save yourself time, however in order for your site to look original and have your own personal touches, you will need to swap or alter the images that came pre-packaged with the website template.

Firstly, you will need to source yourself an image editing package such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. While both softwares are great and can achieve the same results, I strongly suggest that you lean towards the Photoshop. It is a more popular software package and the workings of it quite different from Paint Shop Pro. Once you learn Paint Shop, it takes time to get used to Photoshop.

Simple graphics exercises to get you started.

Once you fire up your software, it’s time to load in an image and start to explore the possibilities. You should find a simple image with not too many colours and depth, a street sign for example is perfect, try to avoid using photographs at the beginning.

You should then select and separate a part of the image, so for example in the case of a road works sign that has a yellow background and a graphic of a man with a shovel, you should try to separate the man from the background.

This can usually be done in more than one way. If the graphic of the man is of one colour (black) you should be able to use a selector tool to select the entire body of the figure, then simply use the cut command or CTRL+C, then open a new canvas by pressing CTRL+N and paste the cut selection into the new canvas by pressing CTRL+V.

(you may have noticed my use of keyboard shortcuts, if you can take the time to learn simple keyboard shortcut commands, you will halve the time it takes you to produce results with your images)

Another way to select and separate a portion of the graphic is to use the lasso selection tool. This allows you to drag a line along the edges of the shape you wish to cut out until you trace the whole surface and end up where you started. This is better method of achieving the results where the image has multiple dimensions and colours such as photographs.

Once you have the selection separated from the main image, explore by reversing it, flipping it upside down and layer it onto different objects. Once you have mastered this, you are 50% there to becoming a self taught graphics manipulator. Other functions within the graphic software packages are pretty self explanatory. The ability to ad text, shapes, resize images, cut and paste are all simple functions that you should have no problems learning quickly.

So how does this apply to a web designer or someone wishing to launch their website?

You will be able to manipulate and change the look of banners, apply new original logos and add your own graphics and text to individualise your project. There is nothing more off putting then seeing familiar website templates used by different websites. It gives the website an element of cheapness and makes them less credible. One of the first things to look at when you wish to purchase a template is how many images it has, and how easy it would be to change the look of that website by altering r altogether changing the images and colours.

Graphic design and manipulation is also handy in everyday life. Often friends ask me to manipulate photographs to make funny images, and get me to design unique birthday cards. There is a multitude of royalty free stock images on the internet that can be manipulated into something original, it’s up to you to unleash your creative side and see what you can come up with.

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 Internet Business » Web Design

• Currently 3.5/5 Stars.

Hey, I thought picture tubes are simply graphics on transparrent layers. In this case, you should be able to open the tube in Paint Shop Pro then save it as a .png file and re-open it using Photoshop. Id imagine even that if you have both programs opened at once, you should be able to drag and drop the tube into a photoshop file. Is this correct?

• Currently 3.5/5 Stars.

Hi there.
Interesting article to read and it s funny to read someone talking about image editing packages and still mentioning Paint Shop Pro. I thought that software was out of date and no longer produced. After reading this article, I googled paint Shop Pro and found that it still exists and is quite a powerful application for graphic designers.
I’m actually a self taught GD from Washington, and the first time I drew a pixel on a screen was using Paint Shop Pro... I think back then the version was 4 or 5. Then as I enrolled into a graphic design course (which by the way I dumped without completion because it was too arty farty)
While doing the course, I’ve found that I had to quickly teach myself around Photoshop as its the preferred and as some say, industry standard software. It took me a couple of days to switch to Photoshop and I’ve never gone back to Paint Shop Pro.
I have to say though, there are some great features in Paint Shop that Photoshop doesn’t cover and that is Picture Tubes. I really enjoyed downloading some old torrent of thousands of pristine picture tubes that i could then use as some design elements.
I think if you are a self taught graphic designer and have some spare time on your hands, you should definitely explore Paint Shop.
My 2 Cents.
Cheerio !