Shell's Tutorials

Magic Wand

For this tutorial you will need a doll or a picture of your choice

We're going to use the magic wand and noise to give her a shimmering dress

Open the graphic you are going to use in PSP. Open a new canvas, I made mine 500x500 transparent. I like to have a lot of room to work with!

With the doll active, go to Edit > Copy

Click on your new canvas to make it active and go to Edit > Paste as new layer

ON your layer palette, right click on the bottom layer and delete it. It's blank and we don't need it. Now right click on your doll layer and rename it doll

Click on the magic wand tool

These are the settings I used

You may need to play around with the tolerance settings, it depends on the picture you're using.

Click on the dolls dress (or where ever you want to add the noise to on your picture)

If it doesn't select the whole area you want to add noise too, go to Selections > Modify > select Similar

It still didn't select the whole dress, if this happens, you can press the Shift key on your keyboard and while keeping it pressed use your magic wand to select the area's it has missed. (I always zoom in when I'm doing this so I can see the parts that have been missed, easier)

You should have something like this

Go to your layer palette and right click on the doll layer and select duplicate. Repeat this so you have 3 copies of the doll layer

Turn off the visibility of the top 2 copies and click on the bottom layer to make it active

Go to Effects > Noise > Add and use the following settings

Click OK

Now, click on the middle doll layer and add the noise again but this time change the noise settings to 45

Click on the top layer and add the noise again, this time changing the settings to 35

Ok, time to add some text

Click on the Text Tool then click on your canvas

When the text entry box opens choose your font and size. Make sure Anti alias and Vector are checked

Type in your text and click OK

Move the text to where you want it on the picture. As we're created it as a vector we can rotate it and stretch it.

When you're happy with your text go to your layer palette and right click on the text layer. Click on Convert to Raster

At this point you can add an inner bevel to your text if you want to.

We now need to duplicate our text layer twice so we have the same amount of text layers as we do doll layers

I renamed all my layers

Now we need to drag the layers into the right positions so we can merge a text layer with a doll layer. Arrange the layers as shown below then turn off the visibility of the top 4 layers and click on the bottom layer to make it active

Right click on the bottom layer and go to Merge > Merge Visible

Turn off the visibility of the merged layer and turn on the visibility of the next 2 layers. Click on the doll2 layer and merge the layers

Turn off the visibility of the layer you just merged and turn on the visibility of the top 2 layers. Merge them then turn all layers back on

Save as a PSP file

Open Animation shop and Open your graphic.

We need to crop away the excess canvas. Click on the crop tool then click on the options button

When the new window opens, click on Surround Opaque Area

Now click on the crop button

All that's left to do now is to save and you're done :o)

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.