Using Masks

By now you should have an idea of the size of PSP and all of the things that are available to you.  If you aren't sure of anything in PSP, and you haven't already, take a look at this tutorial for an overview of everything that is available in the programme.  

This tutorial is going to show you how to use masks to get a variety of effects around the outside of an image - there are a variety of masks that come with PSP and there are countless others online that you can download and use... you can even make your own - I'll show you how in a different tutorial :o) 

You will need:

A copy of PaintShop Pro - you can download a 30 day trial version from here

A copy of Winzip - you can download it from here

This zip file (It's a basic mask that I made myself) unzip and extract it to your "Masks" folder in your PSP directory... this is usually in C:/Programme Files/Jasc Software/PaintShop Pro/Masks 

A picture that you want to use the mask on.  I'm using the one below.  If you want to use it too, right click and save it to your own hard drive.

Fire up PSP (if you already had it open when you extracted the .zip file, you'll need to close it down and start it up again so that PSP can see the new file)

When it's chugged and whirred into action, you need to open up the picture you want to use the mask on (File, Open, then navigate to where you've saved the photo then click OK)

First we need to make sure we've got all the colours available to us, so go to the Colours menu, down to Increase Colour Depth and across to 16 Million Colours

Now that we've got all our colours to play with, we can get on with adding our mask to our picture!  :o)

We need to tell PSP that we want to use a mask on our picture and we need to tell it where to look for the mask, so go to the Masks menu, then down to Load From Disk - this tells PSP that the picture is saved on our machine

You'll now have a dialogue box on your screen - this is PSP asking you where your mask is stored on your computer.  Using the drop-down list at the top, navigate to your Masks directory within PSP - you'll get a list of all the masks on your computer.  In this list, you need to find the one called "Soft Oval" - this is the mask that you extracted from the zip file at the start of the tutorial.  Single click on the name to highlight it and then hit Open

Et Voila!  Your mask has now been applied to your picture!  

Now you can just take a copy of this and paste it onto wherever you want to use it!  Try out some of the other masks that you have on your computer and see what they look like - some of them have really interesting effects!  :o)


 

 

 
 

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