How to change the color of the paint brush in PSPX3?

[rfe777]

I want to use the paint brush for editing a photo I have, but the only color available is black. No matter where I've looked in PSP, there was no option to change the color of the paint brush.
I've read online that you need to change the pallet to material pallet, then go to "Foreground & Stroke Properties" and set the color box to the color I want, but the only colors I get are different hues of black and gray.

Even in Paint it's just a matter of clicking the desired color to use different colors. Why isn't it so simple in PSP?

Anyone knows?

TIA

[df]

Try clicking Image> Increase Color Depth> RGB 8 Bits per channel.

[rfe777]

Try clicking Image> Increase Color Depth> RGB 8 Bits per channel.

RGB 8 bits per channel? What is the meaning of this?

[LeviFiction]

For most it just means how many colors you can use. 8-bits allows for over 16 million colors. Which is usually good for most people. Of course lately people have gotten into 16-bit photo editing which allows a lot more variations. The RGB portion tells it specifically that it'll be using the three primary colors of light.

As you decrease this number you get to use fewer and fewer colors. A GIF image for example can only use 256 colors.

Greyscale images use only a single channel. This channel can only use variations of grey including black and white. This also has only 256 colors, or 256 shades of grey. Which is most likely what your image is currently set to. To add color you need to make sure that PSP knows you want to be using 3 channels at 8 bits per channel to allow you to pick from the 16-million colors.

Others could probably explain it better, but....

In computer graphics each color on the screen is made up of 3 colors (Red, Green, and Blue). Each of these colors can have a value between 0 and 255 (so 256 possible variations of each color). Each color is known as a "channel" so you can manipulate all three at once (which most do) or you can manipulate each channel individually to get many cool results.

In programming a single "bit" is a 1 or a 0. Binary. It's how computers understand numbers. 8 bits put together can represent the numbers 0 to 255 (base 2 math). But that gets a little involved to explain properly. Especially because I stink at math.

So for the programmers it means using a full "byte" (8 bits) to represent each of the different color channels that make up the final image. There is actually a little bit more to it than that, but it's simplified here.

But for you it means over 16 million colors (256*256*256)