Paint Shop Pro Tutorials -- Making Selections for Special Effects |
Making Selections for Special Effects with Paint Shop Pro
This tutorial will show you how to make selections to do special effects using a bitmap drawing program. I used Paint Shop Pro which is available from Jasc Software Inc. Check out their site for a full working shareware demo.
Okay, let's get started.
Have you ever wondered how, in a magazine ad, part of a black and white photo is colored? First open the file you want to work on. Make sure that the color depth is set at 16.7 million. This is so that we can use the colorize effect later.
I've chosen a photo of, Lucy, one of the models I've done some work with. I resized and cropped the photo to help keep the load times down
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| figure 3.1 |
There are several ways to select an area. You've probably used the rectangle tool (the one on the left below)
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| figure 3.2 |
Select the "LASSO" tool and move the cursor over your photo. (You may want to do as I did and, using "VIEW" >> "ZOOM IN", blow up the image so you can get in there real close. The "LASSO" tool works at any zoom level).
Now what I've done is selected the lips of the model by positioning the mouse at one side of the lips and then tracing around them. If you don't get it right the first time just start over until you're happy with the selection. You'll see a trail of broken lines around the area you've selected. Don't worry too much about lining up the start and end points as PSP will take care of that for you. Just get as close as you can. This is where the zooming in helps :)
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| figure 3.3 |
Now, under "COLORS" >> "COLORIZE" you'll get a "COLORIZE" window. I left the "HUE" and "SATURATION" at their defaults of 0 and 200 respectively as this just happened to give me the red color I wanted to use. You can play around to get the color effect you want.
My final graphic looks like this...
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| figure 3.4 |
All set for a new lip gloss ad!
If you're not quite happy with the change use "EDIT" >> "UNDO" and try again.
When you're done you should save the graphic. This time you may want to save it as a JPG and give it a different name from the original. This will make your new graphic Web-ready!
Of course, you can do more than just colorize a selection. You can, for example, make part of a color picture black and white, posterize a selection etc. Have fun. :)
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| figure 3.5 |
That's it.... Be sure to check out some of our other Paint Shop Pro tutorials.
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