:: Making your own masks ::
This tutorial will show you how to make your own masks from something you created yourself. This tutorial does assume that you know the basics of psp.
1. Open a new image with a black background any size you want. I'm going to work with 400x400.
2. Set your background color for white and your foreground color to null.
3. What you can do now is basically make something crazy, anything you want to. You can use a preset shape and then use some of the psp tools for distortion or a plugin. I will put a few strips here to show you what you could do.
4. When you are happy with what it looks like, merge all your layers.
5. Then go to Layers > New Mask Layer > From Image and a window will pop up. You don't need to change anything, just click ok.
6. Next you are going to save your mask. Go to Layers > Load/Save Mask > Save Mask to Disk . Choose a name and save it.
7. Now to use your mask. Open the image you want to use.
8. Go to Layers > Load/Save Mask > Load Mask from Disk
9. A window may pop up telling you that you need to change the target layer to a full layer. Click OK.
10. Find the mask you want and click Load. You will have something like this:
11. If you look at the setting of the Load Mask menu, you can play around with them and make a few things. If you invert the transparency, you will get the opposite of what you had above:
12. You will end up with something like this:
Here are some examples of masks applied onto an image. The mask themselves sometimes don't look like much but once you apply it, it can look pretty cool. The mask is on the left using the same technique as the first strip (and the same used in the rose just above) and the finished image is on the right.
<--- This one is made with a different mask, slight variation from strip 2.
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that it was easy to follow. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
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©2005 Marie Gookin. None of this tutorial may be reproduced in any way.