Changing startup screen

[DONSTAUFFER]

I have been trying to get PSP 2019 to start in edit mode. I found some how-tos on Google, but they were all for older versions, and the preference menus in 2019 have changed, so those old methods do not work. I only use PSP for editing, not management, so I want it to just boot up in Edit mode.

[Ken Berry]

Welcome to the forum!

Go to File > Preferences > General Program Preferences > Tabs and set Edit as the default. You may also wish to delete Manage and Adjust as visible tabs.

[DONSTAUFFER]

Wow. That works! Tabs- never bothered to look there.
Thanks, Ken.

[hartpaul]

As an apparently newcomer it is probablt advantageous to look theough a lot of PSP's general preferences and find out what they mean and do.
Whenever I get a new version of PSP that is one of teh first things I do. I start from the Tabs at the bottom and work my way up.

Tabs - I set Edit as default open and set Manage as viewable although I rarely use it but so many requests on this forum are for problems that occur in Manage mode.

Auto Preserve, - I untick - none of the work I do is worth using it. and I regularly do a save as a pspimage file if I want to record a stop point.

Manage - I untick the top box - could never see the value in spending time rating images with stars. If I find new images that I want to work on then I copy them to a working folder on the desktop so I am always working with a copy and not an original. By doing that on a regular basis I never have to have large numbers of images in a single folder and use Manage mode to locate all my 5 star images .

Auto Actions and Warnings I leave alone.

Transparency and Shading - I leave alone but I note that there I can darken the shading around the crop rectangle choose to enable the shading, automatically show the crop rectangle and allow or disallow the floating crop toolbar
Units - I leav mostly alone , but change the default pixel resolution to 300 pixels per inch.

Miscellaneous - left at default settings.

Palettes - I leave mostly at default but change the Automatically show Palettes to Never as I want to decide which palettes I have open on the workspace. I note here that this is where I can choose to use the Classic Materials properties box and also to show a right pane in the Layers palette or not.

Display and Caching - I leave at default

View and Undo - left at default
By going through this routine I learn where many preferences can be changed.

Then I go to Manage mode and go from Collections to Computer. Then in Computer I Navigate to a small image folder "Test" on my desktop.

Back to Edit mode and make suer that I have the Materials and layers palette only showing.
I Make the learning centre palette visible and then hide it at the right hand side so it can be made to pop out when I choose a new tool that I am unfamiliar with.
I then go to Window and untick Tabbed Documents as I hate tabbed images that fill the screen - I may often work with a couple of images displayed on the workspace so untabbed suits me better.
I then set up a customised floating toolbar containing the 6 most used operations which saves me time going through the menu and drop down choices - I have Levels, Brightness and Contrast, Red/green/blue, Hue Saturation and Lightness, Highlight Mid Shadows, Invert Selection, Select None , and Unsharp Mask in that order.
Then I go and save that workspace.
Even so there are still a lot of buttons on the tool options bar that I have not tried or knaw about so I keep learning new things each time I come to this forum.
Most recently about Corel Instant Viewer and learning how to convert a selection to remove the rounded corners when you expand the selection.