PSP X5 - keyboard shortcut to sharpen image?

[PSP4fan]

Hello all

I discovered Paint Shop Pro many many years ago, and have been using version 4 (that's not X4, but the old Shareware version 4.12, from 1996!) to do the very basic image manipulation that I need to do. Basically: open up a jpg, crop it, resize it, sharpen it, save it. That's pretty much all I need to do 90% of the time, and I love PSP, because it's such a tiny program that it opens up really quickly. I've been thinking about trying a bit of website creation, so I decided to splash out for a decent graphics program. Not being able to afford Photoshop (and I wouldn't know what to do with 99% of it), I thought it made sense to stick with something I know: Paint Shop Pro.

I will still take time to discover its many delights, but for now, I need to be able to do the basic, as described above - preferably using the keyboard. I hate the mouse. If I can avoid using it, I do. But I'm stumped at how to go about sharpening my cropped image, since the keyboard "hotkey" for Sharpen is the same as Skin Smoothing - ie, S. So when I go Alt+A (to open the Adjust menu) and S (to get the Sharpen sub-menu), I get the Skin Smoothing tool. Help!!

Thanks,
Ros.

[PSP4fan]

Never mind... I saw how to assign my own keyboard shortcut to a menu item so I've done that. But this duplicate of the "S" within the Adjust menu should be sorted out... maybe it has been in X6.

[wds937]

It has not been sorted out for X6. There are still duplicated menu access keys (on the "S" key) in the Adjust menu.

It looks as though this problem has been with us since PSP XI, when the Skin Smoothing feature was added. I think this is a case of the developers having run out of available access keys once this was added. Every letter in "Sharpness" is now taken, and every letter in "Skin Smoothing" was also taken--the "M" was used for Automatic Color Balance, which has since been removed from that menu. Keyboard shortcuts could have resolved this, and it appears that's what you did on your own.

[LeviFiction]

You can also edit the menu item to remove the S from Skin Smoothing.

View -> Customize

Click on the Adjust menu.

Right-click on the "Skin Smoothing" option and select "Button Appearance" from the context menu. You will be given an option to change text of the menu. Remove the "&" symbol that appears in front of the S.

The ampersand is used to tell menus to underline and identify the quick key for accessing certain menu items. If you remove the ampersand that letter will no longer point to that command, and it will not be underlined.

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This trick is useful for re-arranging the keys used to access various menu items. So that the commands you use most often are the ones most quickly accessed by these shortcuts.