Printing Gridlines

[3dvisworld]

I wish to take a photo to my studio to paint it on a larger canvas and I am using Gridlines in Paintshop Pro Ultimate. I have my gridlines onscreen for the photo ok, and I have them correspondingly measured to the larger canvas also. Now I would like to take the image (with gridlines) from Paintshop to my studio to begin. Each time I save or try to print the gridlines with image in Paintshop the disappear. How do I keep the gridlines on the image so I can continue to use them as reference in my studio? Hopefully I can transfer a saved image with gridlines to a mobile device for this purpose. Thanks for any help.

[JoeB]

To my knowledge you can't print the image in PSP with the grid lines also printing. But you can quite easily paint lines that follow your grid lines and then print the image with the printed lines.

If you already have your grid, then go to View and if there is no checkmark beside Snap To Grids then click it and that will activate Snap to Grid. Get the Paint Brush with a small pixels size set and, in the Materials palette, select a foreground color that will show up nicely on your image. Then place the paintbrush at the beginning of one grid line (or just quite close to that line) and click once. Then place the paintbrush at the other end of that line near the line, hold down the Shift key and click again. This will draw the complete line and snap it to the grid line completely straight vertically or horizontally even though your two clicks might not have been exactly the same distance from the grid line top and bottom (the tolerance for how far away your clicks can be from the grid lines can be set in the Grid Properties dialogue, which I believe is set to 100 pixels by default).

Then you can print the image with the painted lines. The size of the brush can be as small as 1 or 2 pixels or even more if that's more convenient for you.

If you generally know how many grid lines you want in an image horizontally and vertically, there is a script available that will be even more convenient. It will create a vector layer on your image and let you select the color you want the lines to be, how many pixels wide you want the lines to be, as well as select how many horizontal lines and how many vertical lines you want to create. It will then paint those lines on the vector layer for you and you can print the image with the lines. Because it is a vector layer with vector objects, you can also use the Pick tool in Vector mode to move various lines that you have created or even right-click on a line and delete it. That script is available in the Scripting sub-forum here:

viewtopic.php?f=104&t=64233

[hartpaul]

Or you could do a screen shot and then print or save that to keep the grid lines . Should you need a larger image (as screenshot is limited in size then you coulresize that image - will tend to be a bit blurry but should still show location of parts of image with respect to the grid lines.

[3dvisworld]

Thanks for the suggestions. I tried both of these approaches and each worked. The second one makes use of the Screencapture features of Xbox in Win 10 [Windows + G]. The file gets stored in a 'Captures' subdirectory which I then cropped to image only and emailed to my mobile device.
The first method uses the PaintShop Grid features and once I learned more about this I could change the grid sizes through the script. At that point I can either capture as mentioned above - or actually paint the lines into the image as suggested then print it and send to mobile device.
Both worked.

[Cassel]

You can create you own grid very simply.
- open a blank image the width/height of the space you want between the gridlines
- flood fill with black
- select all
- contract by 2 or 3 pixels (it might depend on the size of your image)
- Delete.

At this point, you might want to save this as a png image, especially if you are using the same gridlines often.
- on your image, add a new raster layer
- in the Materials palette, find the image you have just created with a black border, and use it as a pattern, at 100 scale
- flood fill your raster image with that pattern

Now, if you print your project, the lines will be there for you to refer to.

[hartpaul]

So now we have three independent versions of printing an image with grid lines.
Ain't PSP flaming marvelous? (quaint Australian saying).
Any more?