Using Corel Paintshop Pro to make charts

In this thread, I will show how I use Corel Paintshop Pro to make my charts, like this.....

The charts are in reality nothing but a picture.

So the first thing to do in your Picture folder on your pc is to create a new fold called "charts". That's where you are going to be keeping all your charts once made.


File types - don't think it is hard. There are only two file types we use for our chart pictures.

1. a .pspi image file type - which all the elements (layers) of the chart picture remain unglued together and can be moved around and manipulated.

2. a .jpg file type - which all the elements (layers) of the chart are glued together and end up being one layer. The .jpg format allows you to copy and paste the chart into your post at Christian Forums.

Once inside of Corel ps pro, working on your chart, always save it as a .pspi image before quitting.

When you think you have it finished, then save it as a .pspi file, then save it again but as a .jpg file.

The save option in ps pro is in the pull down menu under "File" in the upper left hand corner.

Let's get started. You are not in ps pro at this time. We first need to get a base chart picture into your picture folder.

First to do is right click on this chart picture. And select "open image in new tab."

A new tab will open at the top of your screen. Click on that. The right click on the chart picture - selecting "save as". A dialogue box will open. From the left column click on pictures, then on the particular folder "charts". Then save.

That will get my .jpg chart into your pc charts folder. It is the correct size to use a base when making your chart, to eventually fit well into your post.

Now then, on that saved chart picture in your "charts" folder, right click on it. And it will give an option to "open with", and one of the options will be corel paintshop Pro. You have to have bought and installed the program for it to be an option.

click on corel paintshop pro. Corel paintshop pro will open with that chart picture displayed.

Next we have to cover over my stuff by creating a rectangular box layer. click on the selection tool on tools column. I have mine placed on the left. The selection tool kinda looks like a little lasso, or maybe a rectangular box. It is the third tool down from the top.

Of the different option appearing, click on the very first one a little rectangle of dotted lines.

Mouse over the picture, in an empty space and make a rectangular box, of the white background, size doesn't matter. You make have to click on the pick arrow in the tool column to finish the selection. You have just made a layer.

On the very top menu, click on "view" scroll down to "palettes" and click on "layers". That brings your layers column into view, which you drag your layers up and down relative to each other.

Right now you are going to have two layers. The base drawing and above that the
rectangle layer you made.

Now mouse over the layer you made, and click on it. That means you are going to be working on that layer only.

On the layer, you are going to see little squares in each of the corner and midpoints. Those are called "handles".

Click on one of the corner handles, and drag. Making the white layer box to cover up the entire drawing, so you have a clean slate to to start from.

If you ever mess up, you can go to the top of the screen and under "edit" select "undo". You can "undo", then do another "undo", then another undo,..... and it will just keep working back through everything you did.

Go to the top of the screen and under file save as - give it a name like "base chart" .jpg.
Which you can use over and over to make charts from, in a size that will fit properly when you copy and paste your chart into your post at Christian Forums.

Don't worry if you need to make the chart taller - that can easily be done. It is the width that is critical.

Any question so far ?

Okay, the principles of making a chart picture or any pictures is making layers. The layers are in a vertical stack in the layer organizer palette, that you selected to view.

Also, other palettes you want to check to be visible are "materials", "tool options:

At this point we have a white canvas or work space in front of us.

So we are gong to make a bunch of boxes, layers for our chart. Same process as before.

Go to the selection tool, the rectangle, and click anywhere on the white work space. You may have to click the pick tool to complete the process of making the box.

So we have a box that looks like this.




The next thing to do is colorize it. But first we have to do a step to make it something to accept being colorized.

Under the Adjust pull down menu at the top of the screen, scroll down to Brightness and contrast, pick on the first option as the top of the choices - "Brightness/Contrast" in the long list. It is the only one you will ever use, for the most part.

Slide the Brightness scale in the dialogue box to the left to darken the layer to gray. Click okay. Now we are ready to colorize it.

Under the Adjust pull down menu at the top of the screen, scroll down to "hue and saturation", of the four options that show up - the only two you ever use is the "Colorize" and the "Hue/Saturation/lightness" - with the "Hue/Saturation/lightness being use most often.

Let's use the "Hue/Saturation/lightness option. Click on that. A dalogue box will come up. Check the colorize box. And adjust the sliders to whatever color you want. I chose green. Click ok.






Next, to make more boxes, right click on the green box, and select "duplicate". Another dupicate layer will be made on top of the existing green box.

Put your mouse on the duplicate layer and drag to another part of the work space.

So now you have this.




Next, open another the Hue/Saturation/lightness dialogue box, and change the color.
I am choosing blue.




So now we have two colored boxes, ie. two layers, which we can stretch/destretch with the handles, and move around on work space by clicking on and dragging to where we want the boxes.

I am moving the boxes for one to be inline in front of the other. The name of the chart we are making is "Daniel 9's 70th week". So save the file as "Daniel 9's 70th week"

Be sure and save the file as a pspi file at this point, in case you want to close the program to take a break. So you can return to it later, with no progress being lost.






btw, I am using "epic pin" to make the screenshots. Another easy to use program.

Okay, that's all for this post. Please make a post if you are following along, or like what you see so far.

okay picking up where we left of in making our chart of "Daniel 9's 70th week"....





When I look at those two boxes (layers), they appear too dark for black text to show up in when I fill the boxes with text.

So, in this case, the quickest way to make the layers lighter is to right click on the boxes, then select properties. A dialog box will come up which we can reduce the Opacity. I am going to reduce it to the 30's from 100. 100, the layer is solid.



After making both layers more transparent, is a number in the 30's, the boxes look like this.... okay that looks a lot better.



okay, now then, I am going to "merge the white background layer, and the original drawing we covered up - making the two, one layer.

click on the white background to select that layer. Then at the top in the pull down menu, pick "layer", scroll down to "Merge" and select "merge down".

We now have one layer, as our base layer. And two box layers above it. Showing in the layers palalette as....

We will add some text to our chart picture in the next post.



.

okay, pickup up where we left off. We are going to add some text to our chart picture.




A few thing about text. The only two fonts type we need to every use is "Times New Roman" and Verdana.

Let's use Verdana.

Click on the text tool, the big "T"



In the "Tool Options" palette, under font window, click, and the choices will appear, select Verdana. The text size is not that critical. I have 26, which is too big, but we are going to stretch it down to the size we like.



Next we have to change the font color, because we don't like white, won't show up on a white background. We want black. click on the font color box. The materials palette will appear. (if not go up to the view pull down menu, go to "View", then palettes, then click on "Materials" ).



Take the slider and start dragging it down, an array of choices will begin to appear...




But we want black, so drag the slider all the way to the bottom....and click ok. Our text we make is going to black.







Having made the text color black. Go to the text tool, the big "T", click on that.
And then mouse over our chart drawing, and pick a place to start the text. It doesn't matter where because we are going to move it, and shrink it into the blue box.

Type the text as "First half"... It is too big and in the wrong place. If we just drag it to the blue box, it isn't going to show... because we have to move the text lay above the blue box layer.





To move the text layer up, we go to the Layer palette. click on the vector1 layer (text layers are vectors - which those don't lose resolution as we drag the text bigger or smaller).



After dragging it to the top....



Now we are going to resize the text by grabbing one of the corner handles with our mouse.



And stretch it down to the size we want.... oops, I exceeded the number (10) of images I can introduce into a post.... will continue in the next post.

Next we are going to drag the text into place.



We are going to repeat the process, which includes moving the text around to line up where we want it, and add some more text to end up with this....




In the next post, we are going to put some arrows on our chart picture. Right now though, save the file, so we don't lose our work up to this point. click on save in the "File" pull down menu in the upper left of your screen. And click "save".

btw, I have not already created the finished chart, I am making the chart up as we go - live action.

Let's add some arrows to our chart picture. Here is our chart from last post.



From the tool bar to the left, click on the third icon down - "selection tool". In the Tool options palette, choose "Arrow 2". We are going to make a sharp pointed arrow head first then add the tail to the Arrow.





Click anywhere on the chart picture, and drag an arrowhead, layer. You may have to click on the pick tool to finish the selection.



okay, we now have an arrowhead layer, but since it is white - it can't bee seen against the white background. We go to the Adjust pull down menu at the top, scroll down and pick "brightness and contrast".




...a dialogue box will appear. Slide the Brightness silder all the way to the left, turning the arrowhead black. click ok.




Mouse over the arrowhead, grab the rotate handle and rotate the arrowhead 90 degrees.





drag the arrow head to the corner of the blue box. And make it smaller by grabbing one of the corner handles and stretching it smaller.






Next to make the tail, make a rectangle box layer, de-stretch it thinner.




change the brightness to black.



drag the tail layer into position with the arrowhead layer.





next, merge the tail layer to the arrowhead lay - to make one arrow layer. But first move the tail layer to be right above the arrowhead layer, in the layer palette.

We can shrink/ enlarge the the arrow layer to our satisfaction, appearance wise, if we need to.

I thinking my arrow maybe a little big at this stage, not sure.

So here is where we are so far on our chart. Save the chart picture, so we don't lose any of our work.

Next to make some more arrows, but I think I am going to stretch my arrow a little smaller. click on the arrow.



grab the upper right handle with your mouse and destretch it to a smaller size.




Next right click on the arrow layer, and select duplicate... a new duplicate layer will be made right on top of the original arrow layer.

drag it over with mouse to be at the right corner of the blue box layer.




Do another duplicate, and move that arrow to the far right corner of the green box layer.



In the next post, we need to put some day information on our chart picture. Be sure and save the chart picture, so we don't lose any of our work so far.

okay, picking up from last post...



we want to put some day information on the the chart. But first we need to make a background layer to highlight the Day text.

Click on the green box to select it. Then right click on the green box, and select duplicate. So we get duplicate green box directly on top of the existing green box layer.

Notice that it appears a little darker shade, because remember we made the green box more opague earlier. Two opaque layers stacked on top of one another gives a dark shade appearance.



Next drag the layer to anywhere on the chart, not occupied.


mouse over and grab the upper right hand corner handle and stretch down the layer.


Then grab the right side mid-point handle and drag the the layer narrower.



Then change the color of green small box layer to a pale tan. click ok.


'
next, drag the tan box layer to just below the blue layer, left bottom corner.


Next right click on the layer, and make a couple of duplicate tan box layers. And drag those into the position, I show below... I stretched them a little wider, because I don't think the text will fit otherwise.




Next click on the text tool, the big "T" in the tool menu column





Type in "Day 1" in verdana font type.



oops too big. stretch it down smaller. Grab the upper right handle to the text layer and stretch it down. And drag it into place over the tan box.



...to be continued in next post.

click on the Day 1 text layer. Right click on it and select "copy".



Now go up to the "Edit" pulldown in upper left corner of your screen. Select "paste as new layer". This what you are going to get...



Do the copy and paste as new layer again. And then drag the two pasted layers into position as shown below.



We need to change the text to "Day 1260" and "Day 2520" .

Go to the text tool, the big T, zoom in, And place the cursor just behind the "1". And and add "260". Go up to the arrow pick tool click on it to complete the process.

Do the same think for correct the text to read Day 2520 on the other text layer. When finished it looks like this. We will have to stretch the one too small tan box to fit with the text width.



after stretching the too small tan box, our chart looks like this...



in the next post, well add some more text, of important events. Be sure and save your chart picture so you don't lose any work up to this point.

create three new text layers. And place them here....



Next mouse over the blue box layer, click on it, and then right click. Then "duplicate".

And move the duplicate straight up to be between the two arrows.



Then stretch it down to look like a line.




Next, using the "brightness and contrast" from the Adjust pull down menu to the top of the screen, reduce brightness all the way to the left, which will make the "line" black (dark grey because the layer is still opaque).

Right click on the line layer, then properties, and change the opaque scale to 100. That will make the layer solid again. And darken the line to black.





right click the line layer, and "duplicate". Then rotate take the line by grabbing the rotatate handle, the little bitty square on the line, just of the right of center. A rotate symbol of two circular shapes will appear. Rotate take it 45 degrees, we are going to make a couple of slashes.



using the eraser tool, erase most of the line



drag the slash to the end of the line. duplicate. And place the duplicate to the other end of line. FYI - this short of dimension line is common practice on architectural drawings.



Next make a text layer and place it over the line. I had to move the line down a little bit to make it look better. To look like this...



Let's call it finished for right now. Save the file (pspi format).

Then save it again - "save as" the jpg type file. Saving as a jpg file will cause this dialogue box will appear, click yes.

And you are ready to copy and paste from your pictures folder, where the new file will be, into your Christian Forums post.

I hope my posts in this thread has helped anyone who wants to make charts using Corel Paintshop Pro.

partinobodycular said:

I've been using Paintshop Pro for 30 years. My suggestion for using it to make charts...DON'T.

Click to expand...

What do you use to make a chart like in the opening post?