Part 1: When to Use Picture Publisher

Part 2: A Sample Scan with Picture Publisher

Part 3: After the Scan: Saving, Printing, Re-Sizing

Part 4: Making Windows Wallpaper

Part 1: When to Use Picture Publisher

Picture Publisher is an image editing program ideal for scanning and manipulating pictures or making photocopies of important documents. Once a picture or document has been scanned, it can then be saved for later retrieval, printed out, or used with other programs, such as sending a picture along with an e-mail.

Part 2: A Sample Scan with Picture Publisher

1. Start the program by clicking on the Picture Publisher icon, which resembles a paintbrush across a rainbow stripe of colors. This icon is located under Programs on the Start menu.
2. Picture Publisher opens with its logo and then displays the various tools and menus.
3. Click on the File menu and choose Setup. From Setup, choose Scanner and the Setup Scanner box appears.
   
4. Click on the Select Source button and the select source dialog box appears listing all TWAIN-compliant devices in the system. Click and highlight the name of the scanner being used and then click the Select button. The select source dialog box will disappear and the Setup Scanner box will return. The name of the scanner that was chosen should now be in the upper part of the box labeled Acquire Device Name. Click OK.
5. Click on the File menu again and select Acquire. This will display the TWAIN interface for the scanner which features scanner settings on the left, and a preview window on the right.
6. Open the lid of the scanner and insert the item to be scanned. It should be placed face down on the glass, lined up with the right-hand corner of the bed.
7. Close the lid of the scanner and click the Prescan button on the Scanner Settings screen. The scanner will make a pass and display a preview version of the image in the preview window.
8. Along with the preview image, the preview window will also contain a dotted line box known as the crop frame. The crop frame determines what exactly will be scanned, and only those items within the frame will be scanned.
9. Most of the scanner drivers will adjust the crop frame to the edges of the image, but it can be adjusted further simply by placing the mouse cursor on the edge of the frame until the cursor becomes a double-ended arrow. Once the cursor has the two ends, click and hold down the mouse button and drag the side of the frame up/down or left/right until it lines up with the edge of the image. Repeat this until all four sides of the frame are lined up with the edges of the image.
10. Click the Scan Mode button on the scanner settings window and choose a setting:

• Color is for color images from photographs, books, or magazines.
• Gray is for black and white photographs, for color items made to look black and white, or for drawings and patterns employing shading and texture.
• Line Art is for black and white text or drawings that have no shading or texture. They are pure black or white.

11. Click the Resolution button on the Scanner Settings window and choose a resolution in dots per inch (dpi) for this scan. Some resolution tips:

• Color images should be scanned at 72-100 dpi for the majority of general uses such as wallpaper, e-mail and web pages. For high-quality printing, they can be scanned at 150-250 dpi.
• Gray images should be scanned at 72-100 dpi for uses such as wallpaper, e-mail and web pages. They can be scanned at 150-300 dpi for most high quality printing, and in some cases the dpi can be as high as the maximum grayscale resolution of the printer, usually around 600 dpi.
• Line Art images should be scanned at 300 dpi for sharp reproductions of drawings and text documents.

12. With the scan settings selected, click the Scan button. The scanner will now scan the image into the Picture Publisher program.
13. Once the scanner has completed its scan, it will be shown in the center of the Picture Publisher screen in a window labeled "Untitled."
14. This finished image can now be printed, re-sized, saved or edited with the Picture Publisher tools.

Part 3: After the Scan: Saving, Printing, Re-Sizing

Once an image is scanned, image editing programs such as Picture Publisher can be used to manipulate the image. The Tool icons on the left-hand side of the Picture Publisher screen are used to paint new colors on an image, select areas of an image, or add text to an image. The Tools are explained in detail under the Help menu and in the Quick Start User’s Guide that came with the program.

Along with image manipulation, the other common tasks performed by Picture Publisher are saving images, printing images and re-sizing images.

1. With the image in the center of the Picture Publisher screen, click on the File menu and select Save As.
2. The Save As dialog box will appear.
   
   
   
   The first selection in the Save As box is Save in. The most common error made when saving files is not remembering where they are saved to, and then having difficulty locating the file later. The Save in box shows the directory folders and drives where a file can be saved. Generally, the Save in box defaults to one of the folders within Picture Publisher, but the icons to the right of the directory can be used along with the down arrow to select a different directory folder or drive.
   
   To choose a directory other than the default, simply double-click on the icon of the directory. It is best to always make a note of the directory the file is being saved to, or create a directory specifically for scanned images.
3. After choosing a directory, the image must be given a filename. The filename itself can be anything that describes the image or is easy to remember. The filename can use up to 256 characters, including symbols and some punctuation marks. Note: If the image is intended for e-mail, it is advisable to only use eight character simple filenames for those using older versions of Windows. The Filename box contains a placeholder which has an asterisk followed by a period and the three letter graphic file extension that will be chosen in the next step. The asterisk is a "wildcard," meaning that it is simply taking the place of the name that will be typed in.
   
   Typing the filename: place the cursor behind the placeholder (i.e. *.bmp) and use the backspace key to erase the placeholder and then type in the new filename. It is not necessary to type the file extension (.bmp) because the program will insert it automatically.
4. The last item to choose is the file extension, which is listed in the Save as type line.
   A file extension designates what kind of graphic file the image will be saved as with each type of format having different features and compatibility with different applications. Clicking the down arrow displays a list of the available types, which are detailed below. Click the desired type to select it.

• PPF (Micrografx Picture Publisher) – This format is used for saving images that contain Picture Publisher information, like masks and undo commands.
• PP5 (Micrografx Picture Publisher 5.0) – This format is similar to a PPF, except it is designed to work with the earlier 5.0 version of Picture Publisher.
• TIF (Tagged Image File Format) – TIFs are the most common type of image file format with images created by scanners usually defaulting to TIFs. RGB True Color images can be saved in the TIF format. TIFs can also be compressed to save disk space.
• GIF (CompuServe Bitmap) – GIFs are device-independent images commonly used for web pages. GIF images use only 256 colors, but they can be compressed to save disk space.
• DCS (Desktop Color Separations) – This format was developed by Quark for use in programs such as QuarkXPress. It is similar to an EPS image, but it creates five separate EPS images, four of which are color separations of the image (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) while the fifth is a preview of the image.
• EPS (Encapsulated Post Script) – EPS stands for Encapsulated PostScript. EPS images are device-independent, meaning they can be printed or displayed on a variety of systems.
• JPG (JPEG File Interchange) – The JPEG image format is very popular for use on web pages and for sending images as attachments with e-mail. JPG images are device-independent with adjustable compression ratios up to 100:1.
• PP4 (Micrografx Picture Publisher 4.0) – This format is similar to a PPF, except it is designed to work with the earlier 4.0 version of Picture Publisher.
• AVI (Microsoft Video) – AVI, or Audio Video Interleave, files are Windows multimedia files which can store video and audio information.
• PCX (PC PaintBrush) – The PCX format is used by certain PC painting programs, such as PC Paintbrush.
• RAS (Sun Raster) – The Rasterfile is a bitmap format created for Sun Microsystems Unix-based systems.
• TIF (Tagged Image File CCITT) – Like the standard TIF, but adheres to the protocol for faxing documents as set by the Comité Consultatif International Téléphonique et Télégraphique (CCITT).
• TGA (Targa Bitmap) – This is a format created for TrueVision video cards. TGA should be used in systems with a TrueVision compatible video display.
• BMP (Windows Bitmap) – Bitmaps are the images commonly used by Windows applications, such as desktop wallpaper. BMP should be used when creating images for use in Windows applications, such as Word, Paint or making wallpaper.
• DIB (Windows DIB) – A DIB, Device Independent Bitmap, is similar to a BMP, except a DIB relies on the device driver of an output device, like a printer, to interpret the DIB colors as colors the output device can display.

5. Click the Save button. The filename will replace the "Untitled" in the titlebar across the top of the image.

Special Note: When saving to a floppy disk, remember that a typical floppy can hold only 1.4 MB or less. Images scanned at high resolutions usually will be too large to fit on a floppy without using compression. Scanning images at lower resolutions, like 72-100 dpi, will keep the file size down and allow the image to be saved to a floppy disk.

1. With the image displayed in the Picture Publisher window, click on File and select Print. This will bring up the Print dialog box, which contains the print options.
2. The left-hand side of the Print dialog box begins with a pull-down menu called Page Setup. This allows us to adjust the size and position of our final image. With Visual selected (the default), we can move our image by clicking on the image and dragging it to a new position, or we can click on a side and stretch or shrink the image to a new size for printing.
   
   If we use the Page Setup pull-down menu to choose Numeric, we can now change the picture’s printing size by typing new values into the Width and Height boxes. We can also uncheck the Center on Page box and enter values into the Top and Left boxes to re-position the image on the page.
   
   In either case, the Allow Size Distortions should only be checked if we wish to allow our re-sizing to distort the image.
3. On the right-hand side of the Print dialog box, our first choice begins with Type of Output. This pull-down menu should be set to match the type of printing we are going to do. The most common choices will be Gray for grayscale and Full Color for color. There are several other choices (Full Color + Gray, Black Ink Separation and Color Ink Separation), but these should only be used with an appropriate printer.
4. Just under the Type of Output menu, there is a box detailing the Printer Selected. Verify that this shows the current printer that is to be used. If it does not, click on Setup to choose the correct printer.
5. The checkboxes underneath the Printer Selected box are either checked or grayed out by default. One that should remain checked is Use Printer Screening. This command allows your printer driver to control the quality of the image.
6. Once everything is set, click Print to send the image to the printer. It takes a few moments for most printers to print a picture.

Re-Sizing an Image

A common misconception is the difference between the size of an image on the screen, and the actual size of the image. The main reason for this is the way image editing programs display images and compensate for certain resolutions.

Most monitors have a resolution of 75 dpi. If an image created at a larger resolution, say 300 dpi, is displayed, the limitation of the monitor makes the image appear larger than it really is.

Image editing programs such as Picture Publisher deal with this problem by displaying the new image within a window in the image editing program, allowing the user to see the entire picture at once without having to scroll the screen. If this image is larger than the size of the window, the program labels the window with a size percentage or ratio. For instance, an image may have 42% alongside the name, meaning that this image is being displayed at forty-two percent of the actual size. Using the Zoom tool, which is a pull-down menu along the top of the Picture Publisher screen, the display size can be changed until the image is 100% or actual size.

The common mistake often made is the thought that if 100% is actual size, then 200% must be twice as large. This is true for on the screen, but when printed, the image is still the original size. The same mistake is made with resolution. Because 300 dpi appears larger on the 75 dpi display, it is often thought that it will print larger. A printer, usually able to handle higher resolutions, will print it at the original size, just of a better quality.

The actual size of an image is reflected in inches, millimeters, picas, centimeters or pixels, and the way to change it is as follows:

1. With the image in the Picture Publisher window, click on the Image menu and select Size. The Size Image dialog box now appears.