Compositing

Composite images are relatively easy to create in Paint Shop Pro 7 using masks.

For this tutorial I decided to use the tired old cat and bird combination. I had to resize the bird image so that it would look more to scale with the cat.

    

Select the image you want to add, in my case the bird and go to Edit>Copy. Then select original image and go to Edit>Paste>Paste As New Layer.

 

Now we'll create the mask. Go to Masks>Show All and then Masks>Edit. You won't see any visible difference in the image yet.

Since we want to get the cat background image blended with the bird image we'll set black as our foreground color.  

 

I used the round brush tool set to 30 opacity and a size of 25 until I got close to the bird. As you can see below by brushing over the mask layer with black it hides what you painted over.

When I got close to the bird I set my brush size much smaller and was careful not to hit the bird when painting around it.

 

Below is my composite image. Pretty simple really and this project took less than 5 minutes to complete. You wouldn't know by looking that this picture is actually two pictures combined.

 

Just to spiff it up a little I added text to it. The text was created with my background image as the fill and then an inner bevel and a drop shadow which resulted in the following image.

Copyright Vikki Olds, All Rights Reserved