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Paint Shop Pro Tutorials -- Advanced Masks Made Simple (A Must See Tutorial)

Advanced Masks Made Simple with Paint Shop Pro (A Must See Tutorial)

Recently I've received a number of e-mail letters asking how to remove one person from a photo and place them in another. Normally, I'd suggest using a more professional program such as Photoshop. However, many people cannot afford, nor do they need, such a package and yet they'd like to be able to reproduce this effect to some degree. Although a truly polished and professional photo manipulation is beyond the capabilities of a program such as Paint Shop Pro, there are still some effects that can be achieved with a little work on the part of the artist. Even with Photoshop, if the finished image, even if it's only somewhat complex, is to be made believable, requires a lot of work by a talented and practiced artist. That said, I'll demonstrate how you can use Paint Shop Pro to get an idea of how this process can be accomplished.

The following tutorial will demonstrate how you can use a mask to create a complex selection. Using this selection, you'll be able to copy & paste an object, such as a person, from one photo into another. The results you get will vary depending on the photos used and other factors. Some gotchas to watch for include:

The overall grain of the two images. You'll want these to match as closely as possible. You may want to add some noise to one of the two images to compensate for any differences.
The direction of light. It won't be too believable if one photo has shadows going left while the other has them going right. You can always consider flipping one image so that the shadows match up.
The color cast of the photos. Unfortunately, this last one is a little more difficult to handle in Paint Shop Pro than it is in Photoshop. If it's possible, you may consider re-shooting one of the photos, having the two photos re-printed with the merging in mind, or even seeing if the colors can be matched during the scanning process.

To start this lesson I'll need some help from my assistant, Zoë (see figure 16.1)

figure 16.1

My niece, Zoë, is just under a year old but her mom said she could help with this lesson.

Before you get started choose File, Preferences, General Program Preferences. In the Paint Shop Pro Preferences dialog box, select the Misc. tab. Make sure that the option for "When viewing an image through the mask represent fully masked areas using" is "50% red".

Load the photo that you want to remove an object, or person from.

Choose Masks, New, Empty.

Choose Masks, Edit. Your photo should be completely covered with a solid black mask.

Choose View, Through Mask. You'll now be able to see your photo through the 50% red mask (see figure 16.2).

figure 16.2

Set the foreground color to white and the background color to black. You can accomplish this by clicking in the foreground/background color swatches and setting the colors or by choosing colors from the color picker.

Now you're ready to start working on the mask. Select the Paint Brushes tool and set the options to the following:

Brush Type: Normal
Size: 5
Shape: Round
Paper Texture: None

You may want to zoom-in a little (see figure 16.3) and you'll probably want to change the brush size from time to time.

figure 16.3

The object is to remove the red, masked area from the portion of the photo that you want to select. In my case I want to select Zoë and leave the blanket. Painting, or drawing, with white will remove the mask and painting, or drawing with black will replace it. Since you can replace the mask it doesn't matter if you draw outside the lines, as it were. Try to come as close as possible, though, so that there'll be a smooth transition from the object to its new background. If you make a mistake, swap the foreground and background colors by clicking on the small, bent, two-headed arrows icon below the current foreground/background colors swatch. You can go back and forth like this removing and replacing the mask until you've removed the mask completely from the object you want to select (see figure 16.4).

figure 16.4

At this point you can touch up the mask, removing any black dots that remain from your paint brush strokes.

Choose View, Through Mask to toggle off the red mask. You'll now see only the mask (see figure 16.5).

figure 16.5

Use the paint brush and either white or black as needed to touch-up the mask. Try to stay away from the egdes, though.

Once you've cleaned up the mask, Select the Magic Wand tool. Set the Feather value to 3 or so, depending on the size of your image (you may want to play around with this to see how it affects the final result) and click in the white area of the mask.

You now have a selection that exactly matches the object or person you want to copy.

Choose Masks, Edit to remove the mask and you'll see that the object you masked out is selected.

Choose Edit, Copy.

Open the new image you want to paste the selected object, or person, into. I created an image of clouds to depict what a little angel my niece is :)

With the new image active, choose Edit, Paste and move the selection into place (see figure 16.6).

figure 16.6

You'll have to decide, on an image-by-image basis if the image looks right and perform any necessary changes. If you can't get it quite right you may have to re-consider the choice of photos and try again with a couple of others.

Good luck and have fun.

That's it.... Be sure to check out some of our other Paint Shop Pro tutorials.

High Quality video-based tutorials
...with over 300 different titles, all taught by professionals. Learn any application in a fraction of the time right from your own desktop. This unique method offers accelerated learning and a high retention rate. Here are a couple of topics that you might find interesting. View free demos of the courses using one of the links listed below.
Corel Paint Shop Pro X Essentials	Paint Shop Pro 7 Tutorials




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If you own a digital camera and you're anything like me, you have thousands of digital photographs. It's great having all of your photos at hand, but how do you catalog them? What if you're looking for a specific image? No problem... Help yourself, and GrafX-Design by downloading Google's photo software.

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