I will be manipulating the images quite a bit in order to achieve the effect for the background that I want.
It will be a border background, and the main portion of the body will have some embossed details.
The first image we will be working with will be the one with the reindeer. And yeah, Christmas is coming soon, so I decided to make another Christmas background for this tutorial.
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Alright, now to begin. The first thing I'm going to do, is "cut down" the image to a more workable size. To do that, I'm just going to use the square cutting tool, as pictured below. (I'm going to be using Paint Shop Pro 8, but Paint Shop Pro 7 and 9 are similar.)
As shown above, those are the three cutting tools that we will be using. The top one is the square tool, the middle is the freehand tool, and the bottom one is the magic wand tool. I will explain them as we get to use them, as we will be using all three in this tutorial.
First off, we will be using the square cutting tool to "trim down" the reindeer image to a more workable size, and to cut out some of the unwanted solid colour from this image.
Go ahead and take your square tool, and make a box around the image where you want it trimmed down to, like this:
Now you see a line around the image, where you want it taken down to. Now, go ahead and "copy" it. When you copy it, it will copy only the portion of the image that you have selected in this way. Right click on the image, and select copy. Then right click on an empty section of your program, and chose paste as new image.
You should have something that looks like this:
You could also use the cropping tool to get a similar effect, but thats not for this tutorial. Now that you have a more manageable image, you can close down the original reindeer image. Now, we will use the freehand selection tool. This is the hard part, and you will need to pay close attention to what I say.
First off, you need to select the freehand tool, and amke sure that it is set as "point to point," as shown below:
What I am going to try achieve is to take out all of the white around the reindeer and elf, and replace it with a soft textured, light green colour.
For the first thing you need to do, is you need to go to Layers, then Properties.
Once there, set the opacity to 99, and then hit ok.
It might not appear to have done anything, but try skipping this little step, and you will mess up your entire background.
Now that you have your opacity set, go ahead and outline all the white around the reindeer and the elf, like this:
Now thats done, you can go up to the little scissors button, and click that a couple times. Now you will notice a grey and white checkerboard pattern surrounding your reindeer and elf image, thats a transparent background. Like this:
Once you have it transparent, just right click on the image to make the selection lines around the reindeer disappear, as you are finished with this selection tool. We will be doing some other work, and then we will be going on to the magic marker selection tool.
First off, you will need to create a new image with a soft texture on it. I have one created before hand that I will use for this tutorial. (I will go into making soft textures in a different tutorial, it's relatively easy.) But for now, we will just use this one:
Go ahead and open the soft texture image into your paint shop program. Once you have it opened, go to your reindeer image, right click, and select copy. (DO NOT select Copy Merged.) Once you have it copied to your clipboard, right click on the soft texture image, and chose paste as new layer. You will wind up with something like this:
Since it looks a little plain, Im going to add a drop shadow to it. You can skip this part, or refer back to another one of my tutorials where I show you how to do a drop shadow. After the Drop Shadow, Im going to buttonize it, and I would up with an image like this:
Now, we are dont with that one, and we will work quickly with the Holly Leaf image. So, go ahead and minimize the reindeer one (dont close it out!) and bring up the holly leaves one.
Once you have the holly leaf one up, go ahead and go back to Layers, Properties, and set the opacity to 99. Just the same as we did for the reindeer one. Now, we will go ahead and use the magic wand selection tool to cut the white out around the leaves. We will need this one for our backgrounds body, to add a little detail to the solid colour.
(In essence, I will be doing pretty close to the same thing I did in my last tutorial, where I made a seamless, embossed tile background. However, I will not be doing this one as a seamless tile, I will be just embossing it.)
Now that you have the magic wand tool ready, and the opacity is adjusted, go ahead and click inside the white area around the holly leaves. Now, go ahead and click the scissors tool and you should wind up with something like this:
that image has been prepared the way we want it, now we will be assembling our background. We are almost finished, just a couple more steps to go.
Now, we need to open a new image to use for the body background. I usually use one that is sized 1122 wide by 250 high. I chose a dark green too, because it's a christmas background.
Now, go to your reindeer image, and resize it 200 wide, by 250 high. Go ahead and paste it into your solid colour background, and move it over to the left hand side. (Like I have done in my other tutorial column, making a simple border background.)
You should have wound up with something like this:
Now that you have your border done, all you need do is copy and paste your embossed holly leaves into the background, and move them where you would like them to sit. After you have that done, you should have something like this:
Now, all you have to do is go back to Layers, Properties, and reduce the opacity to something between 20 and 25, and you will be done. Save your background, and upload it to allpoetry to your christmas poem, and enjoy!
Go here to look at this background that is submitted to a poem:
http://allpoetry.com/poem/show/3617114
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