TPaint
Fred,
You're right: TPaint is kinda limited. BUT, since I've used it as my primary
paint program for about 2 years now, I've grown quite accustomed to it myself.
My first tip for capturing photos is to crop, zoom, and position within the
camera as much as possible. I do photo montages pretty regularly, and will
zoom and crop before grabbing the frame whenever possible, so that the picture
fills the frame. There's usually plenty of superfluous junk in photos anyway,
so this takes care of it about 99% of the time.
For the pictures where the above scenario isn't feasible, if I had an external
device (which I don't) that would cleanly shrink and position images, such as
the MX-50 (does it do it cleanly?), I would make heavy use of it for sizing and
positioning the image before grabbing it as a framestore. Then I'd load it
into TPaint for adding backgrounds via rub-thru, etc.
As far as the other intricacies in TPaint, only practice will make it perfect,
and it's still rather difficult sometimes.
On the subject of other paint programs, I'm chomping at the bits for Alpha
Paint. The features sound marvelous to me, and if the quality is like Montage
it'll be fabulous. I am hoping that they've found a way to make it a little
faster than Montage, though, cause it's dreadfully slow, IMO.
Jerry