Misses BeeHaven Scrapbooking

A few years ago in one of the many yahoo groups I belong I received this great tutorial for understanding the use of Mask and making your own from scratch. I have tried contacting the original email owner to no answer, actually the email bounced back.

Well I thought I would share this with you too ,as I know many scrappers will benefit from this great tutorial. I have added screen shots to provide examples of the steps as the original email only included text and I have added a bit more detail to some step explanations as these steps where originally for PSP 7 and that is now 4 version ago hehe

There are several sections to this tutorial so I will give you a bit at a time to digest. Here is an explanation of what a Mask is and making your own masks the easy way in Paint Shop Pro.

Really the most simplest way to understand what a Mask is in Paint Shop Pro or any other graphics program is to think of a stencil. You know those stencils we trace shapes with or use for crafts to paint a pattern etc.

Suppose you created a simple stencil with cardboard. If you had a piece of cardboard and cut a circle in the cardboard. Now, if you took that cardboard and held it over another piece of cardboard and then took a can of spray paint and sprayed through the cardboard onto the bottom piece of cardboard then it would create a painted circle onto that bottom piece of cardboard. Masking is actually masking off an area and the following is another way of describing the masking of an area:

Here’s a quick and easy tutorial on creating simple masks. This simplistic tutorial should convey the Basics of Masks, How to Create Masks, Save Masks, Load Masks, and Delete Masks.

Step 1. Open up Paint Shop Pro and using the Material Pallet set the Foreground to Black and Background to White.

Step 2. Click on File then click New from the menu and set Height to 400 px and Width to 400 px 16.7 million colors with a black background, and click OK.

Step 3. From the toolbar select the Ellipse Shape tool, this is the required tool to draw a circle shape. Now left click with your mouse and drag the cursor to create a black circle (size doesn’t matter) and let go of mouse button.

Step 4. Click on Layers and then select Merge All Flatten. This places the white background and your black circle as one layer rather than two separate layers.

Step 5. Click on Layers and select New Mask Layer > From Image. Make sure you have the following settings:

• Source window =Pick the image you created mine was called Image1
• Create mask from = Source luminance
• Invert mask data = Unchecked

This places your mask into the memory of your computer but it is not yet saved so we need to do one more step to save the mask. If you do not save the mask you can not reuse it over and over later as needed.

Your image will now look something like this.

The white part is where the image you mask will show through and the transparent part will totally cover what is behind it.

Step 6. Click on Layers and select Load/Save Mask > Save Mask To Disk and a dialogue box will pop and ask for a new name for your mask. Type a name for the mask you are creating and then click the Save Button.

The masks you create and save will automatically be placed into the My PSP folder of your My Documents folder.

NOTE: If you uninstall Paint Shop Pro the masks are not deleted they will remain in the directory and you can copy those files to a diskette, CD or another computer, if you want to let someone borrow your mask or use it on another machine!

Congratulations you just created your very own mask in Paint Shop Pro. Now this mask will be in your Mask library for use when ever you so need. Stay tuned for the next part in our Masks tutorial and I will show you have to use a mask on a photo image for your scrap book page.

Happy Creating!!

If you're new to our site at Misses Beehaven, you may want to subscribe to our RSS Feed and receive instant notification of any new items we add to our site. Thanks for visiting!