Installing Paint shop Pro is pretty much a “no brainer”. You put the CD in and choose “install”. The only recommendation I have regarding installation is that you might want to change the folder where it installs. If you let it auto install, the program will install in C:/Program Files/JASC/Paint Shop Pro 7. That’s buried pretty deep and can be a real pain if you need to visit the folder where the program in installed. I have mine installed in C:/Paint Shop Pro 7.

When you are done installing the program, take a look at all the added files on the CD. There are lots of additional graphics and this is where you will find the tutorials for the Web Sets provided on the CD.

Once the program is installed, your listing of sub folders will look similar to the graphic below. I have a few extra directories created to hold graphics I don’t want loaded into the Cache when a tool is loaded. I’ll address these later in this tutorial.

Following is a listing of the sub-folders contain:

Anims

This folder contains elements used by Animation Shop.

Brushes

This folder contains your brush files. The default brush file is “jascbrush.jbr”. When you create your own custom brushes, they will be in “UBrush.jbr”.

Cache

Paint Shop Pro 7 uses Cache to pre-load the graphics contained in the Tubes, Shapes, Brushes, Patterns and Textures folders. This action is performed the first time you open the associated tool. If you have numerous graphics in any of these folders, it can cause performance problems in slower machines with low amounts of ram. Fortunately JASC provides you with a way to intelligently handle this situation. Under File>Preferences>File Locations, you can set up to 3 folders to pre-load graphics from (see Customizing tutorial). By organizing your folders, you can keep the graphics you use most in the primary folders and graphics you use rarely in sub-folders. As you can see by the above graphic of my sub-folders, I have several pattern and texture folders for this purpose.

Camera

When you install Paint Shop Pro, you will be asked if you want to install Digital Camera Support for various cameras. If you install camera support, the files will be in this folder.

Frames

The frames in this folder are the default frames that come with the program. You will find numerous other frames including some very nice edge frames on the Paint Shop Pro 7 installation disk in a folder called Frames. If you download frames created by other people, all you need to do is to place the frames (assuming they are unzipped and have a “pfr” extension) in this folder and the next time you call up frames, the new frames will load into Cache.

Gradients

This folder is where all your gradient presets are stored. When you create new presets, they are also stored in this folder. If you download gradient presets from the internet, just place them here. The gradient file extension is “jgd”.

Patterns

Any graphic placed in the Patterns folder, saved as a “.bmp” will be available as a choice through the new Color Palette and will be an available choice when you use the Sculpture tool.

Presets

Many of the new Effects available in Paint Shop Pro 7 allow you to save the current configuration of the effect as a “preset”. All those presets are saved into this folder.

Shapes

This folder contains all the shapes available to the shapes tool. There are several shapes files that don’t pre-load with the program on the CD. If you want those shapes available, simply copy the files and paste them into the Shapes folder.

Styled Lines

This folder contains presets for styled lines.

Textures

This folder contains greyscale images saved as “.bmp” files. These textures work with the setting on the Color Palette and are the textures used by Effects>Texture Effects>Texture.

Tubes

This folder contains the default tubes that come with the program. There are tons of tubes available for free on the Internet (just do an Internet search for PSP Tubes). Tube files can be rather large, so I recommend you only keep frequently used tubes in the main sub-folder. Create a Tubes1 folder for tubes you rarely use and set the File Location (See Customizing PSP) to the sub folder when you need these tubes.