| PaintShop Photo Pro X3 for Photographers Once you've got your head round the idea that all digital pictures require at least some tonal fix-ups, you'll begin to appreciate the power of selections. A selection allows you to isolate part of a picture so that you can then apply a change or filter effect to that selected area only. PaintShop Photo Pro not only has a wide range of selection tools but also a comprehensive range of modifier features (under Selection Edit mode) that are so good as to shame most other photo-editing programs. Perhaps, after tonal fix-ups and learning about selections, you'll move on to layers. Layers offer the digital image-maker incredible editing capabil- ities. You can add disparate picture elements to a `master' picture file, move them about, change their colors and contrast, and then move them some more to make the weirdest montage effects imaginable. The reason you'd keep all these elements on layers is that you can move everything else in the frame even after it has been saved in a layered format. Once saved in a flattened, non-layered format, you lose all editability. Layers can also be radically changed using layer masks or individual adjustment layers. An extension of the layers concept brings us to the use of text. Paint- Shop Photo Pro has a text engine that allows you to add text, as a separate vector layer, to any document. Again, the advantage of this is that you can return to the picture at any time and edit the text layer, changing the size, font, kerning or other text-specific characteristics. Because this is done using a special vector layer (not pixel-based), there's no loss of quality. Vector text introduces us to the creation of vector shapes and art. All digital scans and photographs are bitmap or raster files; they are made up from pixels, which explains, in some part, why a bitmapped image requires so much computing power to manipulate. An A4 photo contains more than 20 million pixels! Vector images, on the other hand, are made from mathematical calculations: dots and points on the canvas that are filled with flat or graded colors. An A4 vector illustration might only be a few hundred kilobytes at most. Besides a small file size, the beauty of vector art is that it's scalable. You can increase or decrease vector shapes to almost any dimensions with no discernible loss of quality. Enlarge a bitmapped file too much and it begins to look distinctly fuzzy around its edges. Vector images are created and edited using the Pen tool, one of the most sophisticated of all the tools. The Preset Shape tool and the Rectangle, Ellipse, and Symmetric Shape tools also create vector objects. Other advanced features of PaintShop Photo Pro X3 include the use of layer and image masks, adjustment layers, gradients, the picture tube, sophisticated warping tools, a range of very cool printing aids, framing assistants, GIF and JPEG image optimizers, image mapping, and image slicing. 12