You can create a new image with the new button or menu item.

It asks for the size and resolution and the size can be in pixels, inches, or cm and the res is in pixels per in or pixels per cm.

The background color can be a number of basic colors, the current brush colors or no color.. All pretty easy.

The image type is the image bit depth so usual set of 1,4,8,8 grey, or 24 bit. There is an implicit ability to do alpha channel compositing which may or may not get saved out depending on the file format.

You can open an image in the usual way. As I said on another thread, PSP 7 does not handle PNG with 8 bit alpha but Johnn says that PSP 8 can. Makes little difference to me tho. The images it can open are usually up to about 12K pix square when it starts to crash with really big images. Gimp and PhotoShop do better here. Again tho this is not used all that often because images > 8K or so should be tiled.

One nice feature of PSP is its browser where it can look in a directory and get all the images and put them up. It has a usual explorer style nested folders list on the left and the images on the right. You can drag images into folders, rename them and click on them to bring them up using this feature. You can quickly get to it using 'ctrl B'. One thing to bear in mind is that you have to manually update the folder tree if it changes. To get to that you must RMB in the thumbnail window and select 'refresh tree'. When you close the browser it saves a file into that directory of the thumbs and info so its quick next time you browse there. This feature is a strong one of the app.