transparent or white background in PSE?

[usukhk]

I'm trying to get the hang of using PSE 3.0 by making some layouts - I don't plan on saving these. but just want the practice before I take the PSE class here at dsp. In any case, when I open a new blank page, should I always chose white as the background or can I use transparent as well? It seems that I will be using the foreground color/paint bucket tool to "color" my page anyway, so does it matter? My second question is when I use a premade background paper, do I drag it on top of my new blank page or do I just use it without a blank page beneath it? I thought I would drag it on top of a background paper in order to resize it to suit my needs - is this okay?
Thank you for all the help!! :)
hilda

[Emma]

white or transparent is, as you said, preference. I like to start with white. But when I'm creating an element by itself, I use transparent (easier to save as a PNG later), so I went to Edit>Preferences>Transparency and changed the transparent settings to have a tiny checkerboard with an almost white gray, so I can hardly see the checkers. Makes it feel more like white so I can see what I'm doing, but just enough checker that I know it's transparent.

Always start with a new image for your layout and drag your papers etc over to it. You can delete that background layer if you'd like. But this allows you to resize the paper as a layer (in the original file it's just flat). And it also prevents you from saving over your paper by mistake.

Looking forward to having you in class! August? I'm not offering in June or July: it's usually a busy class and I'm having a baby :) Let us know how that goes!