When I take a picture of an item in a plastic covered box, the glare from the flash can be seen on the picture. I want to save mypix on CD but can I organize them and put captions under them and maybe a fancy background first, or do I need some other software package to do this?
From Carol:   There are ways of making a photo program on a cd, but generally speaking you will need software unless you write HTML pages, put your photos in the pages with whatever captions and backgrounds you want, save all the HTML pages and the photos to the cd, and view the cd with your web browser. But there are a lot of different software packages that allow you to make slideshows on cds. If you happen to use Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum for burning your cds, there is an excellent program for making photo cds built into that. Presentation programs can be used for slideshows too. I use Lotus Freelance for this sort of thing. It lets you arrange your photos in a slideshow, cross fade between them, add music or audio commentaries, and have the program play automatically, or the viewer change the slide when they are ready. It has a standalone viewer program that you can put on the cd so that people who do not have Freelance can view it. There are quite a lot of these type of programs around. If you do a search at somewhere like Tucows for presentation or slideshow programs you should find some less expensive ones - shareware or freeware.

At some point, I noticed that when I would go to apply a fill, doesn't matter what type, etc....I would only get a partial fill. I have to apply the fill 20-30 times to get it to completely fill the area/selection, whereas before it would take just one click. I'm sure I've altered some setting but have no idea where to look. Any thoughts?
From anonymous:   Most likely, you have the flood fill tool set on a low tolerance. To get the entire selection to fill with one click, set the tolerance to 100 or set the match mode to "none." You should be able to find these settings in the tool option box as usual.. Hopefully this will fix the problem.

Close cropping pic to remove background Appreciate some help.  
From J Duke:  When you open the image up, choose the selection tool and choose rectangle (or desired shape) and then whether you want feather on or off, if you want to just make it a rectangle I would also make sure antialias is turned off. Select the part of the image you want then go to the image drop down menu and choose crop to selection. If you are looking to just pull the image completely out of the background to place in a new image then use the lasso tool with a 1 feather and trace around the image (suggest zooming in to do this). then copy and paste.
From Joe:   The other common cause would be to have a texture set - check that the foreground/background textures are both set to null.

Jasc Software includes a number of tips and tricks for using PSP as part of their software. Did you know that most people turn off the tips without ever really reading them?

Just a quick note: anything suggested in previous versions, can often be applies to newer versions with a little modification, so don't just dismiss these older tips for applying to older versions only, because they really don't.

Send your tips in to: tips@pspug.org.