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A lot of people don't feel comfortable using the mask editor, so there's another way to create a mask using the tools you're already comfortable with. Let's create a oval matt for a picture, so the image has a transparent frame area around a image. You'll need a picture of a person/place/thing to be matted, and it'll work best if the picture is noticeably rectangular. (much taller than wide and I'll explain the reason for this later on..) Open the picture in PSP. Open a new image, 400 x 400, 16.7 million colors, Black. (yes, now we have two images.) Click on the Selection tool, and in the control box, set Circle, Feather 5. Watch the status bar at the bottom, start from 200, 200 and drag the circle out to (20,20)>(380,380) Select the Fill tool, select a primary color of White and fill the selection. Now you should see two images on your PSP desktop. The original rectangular photo image, and a square black picture with a white circle in the middle.
Activate the photo by clicking on it's top blue bar. Remember that Black in a mask (and this black and white image will soon become a mask!) will black out the image to transparency. Click Masks- New- From Image You'll get a drop down list of the images on the PSP desktop with the currently selected image called 'This Window'. (which is the photo. We don't want the mask to come from the photo.) From the drop down list select the name of the image with black background, white center. It'll likely have a name like 'Image 1' (or 2 or some other number. Mine was 3.)
Click the button 'Source Luminance'. Click OK. Whammo! We have an photo in an oval clear frame!
Oval? Where'd that come from, we started with a circle in a square? By picking up a mask from a image, an automatic resize took place which forced the mask to be re-sized from the source to the destination. (this is also true of a mask loaded from a saved image on the hard drive, but it isn't true of an mask saved in the Alpha Channel!) Remember, from Alpha Channel, it's the same exact size, from a saved mask on Hard Drive or other image, it'll resize to the current. Since the destination was rectangular, the square mask image was stretched and compressed to create the oval shape. If our original picture was square, the mask would be a circle, if the original was rectangular, wider than high, the oval would stretch out into a horizontal mask. Let's finish up the picture we're doing. Add a new layer, drag it's name in the layers control box to below the background layer, fill it with colors or patterns to make the picture look good. I used the Phone Pole from the PSP6 patterns directory.
You can save the circle image as a low compression JPG and load it later to re-use. Or.. PSP has many paths to the same destination, do a Masks- Save to Disk or Masks- Save to Alpha Channel (remember that masks from the alpha channel don't re-size!) Let's review. We created a black and white image with lots of feathering between them to make a fade out area. We used that image to create a mask and applied it to a photo. The image which created the mask can be modified and saved as an image, in one of three different ways, to be used for creating a mask in the future. Masks aren't all that mysterious once you start using them, and the more you use them, the simpler they are. Try doing this tutorial again, but in the b/w image, instead of drawing a circle, see what happens when you use the flood fill tool to load a white to black gradient. Change the gradient with the Colors-Adjust-Brightness/Contrast. Experiment- It's the fastest way to learn.-Ron |
