Masks are a great way of adding decoration to photos, and best of all, they don’t alter your original image at all! Paint Shop Pro comes with a few masks installed, and you can get more with the PSP V8 Resource Pack here: Resource Pack here Save the masks in your local drive>My Documents>My PSP Files>Masks.
Open the image you want to use and go to Layers>Load/Save Mask>Load Mask From Disk on the Menu Bar. This will open the Load Mask dialog box: I won’t go into detail here; I’ll just show you the settings that you will normally use with a mask.
1. Create mask from>Source luminance.
2. Orientation>Fit to canvas.
3. Options>Show all mask.
Unfortunately the only preview you get is the one shown; this isn’t much help in how it will look on your chosen photograph. The only way to find out what the mask looks like is to try it and see; if you don’t like it use the Undo command and work your way through the masks available.
Here is my photograph:
1. Before applying the mask.
2. With the mask applied, but no background.
3. With a simple background added.
You can also merge the mask layer with the photograph, once you have it exactly as you want it. Use Layers>Merge>Merge Group, and this will keep the transparency of the image so you can place it on whatever background you choose.
Until this point your photo has not been altered at all; merging it with the mask will make the change permanent, so please work on a copy of the photograph, rather than the original.
You can download a PDF version of this tutorial by clicking HERE
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