# Starting to know &chalk;

So, let's show you all the niceties. You can start &chalk; either on its own or from the &koffice; shell. In your &tde; menus, &chalk; should be placed either under Graphics or under Office — it depends a bit on who packaged &koffice; for you. Or do what I do: press &Alt;F2 (which opens the minicli), type ``chalk`` and press OK.

A little later, you'll be greeted by a dialog:

The Create Document dialog The Create Document dialog

The Create Document dialog

This is standard for &koffice;: you can create a new document, choose a document from among your files or select a document you had opened in an earlier session. We have got a bunch of templates here, ordered by color model. &chalk; is a very flexible application and can handle many different types of images: CMYK images for printers, RGB images for the web, RGB images with high channel depths for photographers, watercolor images for painters — and more. For now, choose Custom Document. That will allow us to see the New Image dialog box:

The New Image dialog The New Image dialog

The New Image dialog

Here you can give your document a name, determine the dimensions and the resolution. The combination of width/height and resolution determines how big your image will be on screen or on paper: if your image has a resolution of 100x100 dpi, and your image is 1000x1000 pixels big, then, if everything is configured correctly, your image will be exactly 10 inches long and 10 inches wide if you check with a ruler, no matter the resolution of your screen or of your printer — if shown at 100%. However, life is seldom so well-regulated that this actually works out. For now, just think pixels, not inches.

The next group of options is a lot more interesting than resolution: &chalk; is an enormously flexible application and you can work with many kinds of images. For this tutorial, just select RGB (8 bits/channel). You can also select a profile. For now, we leave this at the default setting of sRGB built-in - (lcms internal).

In the third option group, you can select the initial canvas color and the amount of opacity/transparency of this color. Furthermore you can add a description of the contents. We leave these options at their default settings as well, so click Create to actually create the new image.

You will now see the main &chalk; screen.

&chalk;'s main screen &chalk;'s main screen

&chalk;'s main screen

On the left hand side and on the top, there are toolbars which offer you access to tools for painting, editing, and selecting. You can find a more detailed description of these toolbars here. The actual painting area is in the middle. On the right side of your screen, there are various palettes, which you can read more about in this section. Finally, there is a menu bar at the top of the screen, as usually. Read more about it here.