If you followed the tutorial on Masks, this is going to look familiar,....

Important information: Since this tutorial involves the use of layers just like the mask tutorial, if you think you might want to come back to your project later on, be sure to save the file twice.

First, you want to save it in *.psp format. From the menu bar click File/Save Copy As and make sure the file type you select is Paint Shop Pro (*.psp). Why? This image contains layers. When you save it in anyother format, for example jpeg or gif, PSP automatically merges all the layers into a single image. Once that is done, it can't be Un-Done. All the layers are gone. So save a copy first in psp format, then in whatever other format you want to use.

Thanks Petra for suggesting this information be included in the tutorial.

A Paint Shop Pro 9 version can be viewed here.

There are a number of ways you can cut out a portion of an image. You can use the Point to Point or Freehand selection method for example. But I like to do it this way, when all I have is a simple image like this.

This image was posted on a PSP forum by someone asking how they could out the young men from the background.

I decided to tackel the problem, and this is the results I came up with.....

Looks pretty good huh? OK, heres how we do this...

First open the image you want to cut the background from. Now from the menu bar select: Window/Duplicate.

This will duplicate your original image. You can now close your original, and work only with the dupe. Why?

It's simply a precaution. If you make a mistake somewhere along the line and mess up the image, no big deal, since it's only a copy. Your original is still safely tucked away and you can just open it and duplicate it again.

Another good tip, that really applies to any graphic work you might be invloved in. SAVE OFTEN! You can be sure if your computer is going to "burp" and lose all your hard work, it will happen only after you've invested a lot of time in the project. I've never had my system go AWOL at the start of a project, always near the end. This is especially true if your system does not have much RAM memory...

OK, lets get back to work here...... Now, click on your Layer Palette. When the Layer Palette screen opens, place your mouse over the background tab. A thumbnail of your image should appear. This means it is being used as the background. We want to make it a layer, so double click on that tab.

When the Promote To Layer dialog box pops up, use the default settings, but give it a better name. In this case I named it theguys. Then select OK.

Now from the menu bar select:

Layers/New Raster Layer.

When the Layers Properties dialog box pops up, (it looks just like the other one that came up) use default settings again, but give it a name. In this case I used theguysmask.

Your layers palette should look like this:

with theguysmask layer selected (or highlighted).

Now from the menu bar select:

Masks/New/Hide All

then

Masks/Edit

then

Masks/View Mask

This will cause a red overlay to appear on your image.

This red overlay is the mask. Now masks are funny little critters. With a mask, whatever is covered in red will be hidden (or masked, hence the name masks...)

So what we want to do is "uncover" only that area of the image we want to see. In this case, we want to cut out the background, so thats the area we want to leave covered.

Now, without getting into all the technical lingo, lets surfice it to say that to remove a maksed area, you use the color white. To replace or add to the mask, you use the color black.

When you work with masks, you only have 256 colors available to you. Black, White, and 254 variations of gray in between those 2 colors.

If you click on the foreground/background tool

instead of getting the standard 16 million color palette, you would get one that looks like this:

with pure black at the upper left and pure white at the lower right, with 254 shades of gray inbetween them. We want to make sure our foreground color (thats the box on top) is set to white.

If yours isn't, change it now. Lets continue.

First, zoom into your image a few times. This will let you see a little better what your doing. Now you want to select the Paint Brush tool, and from your Tool Options box, use these settings:

Now start working from inside the image. With a brush size of 6, it is going to uncover a lot of mask, so you don't want to start right at the the edges of the image. Start a little back from the edge and work your way slowly towards the edge.

I like to use a fairly large bursh size, because it helps smooth out the edges. You can play around with the size settings to find one that works better for you. Work your way around the whole image, always working from the inside and moving towards the edge.

Heres a tip..... After a few brush stokes, click your left mouse button... Why?

Well if you make a mistake, and want to use your UnDo option, it is going to Undo everything since your last mouse click.

If you've done a lot of painting without a mouse click, and select Undo, it will undo a lot of work. Your going to have to go back and re-cover a lot of ground.

OK, so you've been working and now your image looks something like this:

All thats left is to remove the remaining red mask from the inside of the image.

Now, we have the area we want to save unmasked. So here comes the fun part.

From the menu select:

Selections/From Mask.

You will notice that the area you uncovered has now been selected, as evidenced by the presence of those "marching ants" around the area.

Heres comes the important part. If you don't follow this step, your going to have troubles.....

What we want to do is use a simple Edit/Copy and Edit/Paste operation. But you have to do one important step first.

With your masked image open, click on the layer tool.

When the Layer Palette opens, theguysmask tab should be selected. You are going to want to click on theguys tab and make that active. When you do, your image is going to change. You will see the original image, with the original background still intact, but your selected area will still be selected.

This is where we want to make our Edit/Copy selection from. So from the menu bar select:

Edit/Copy.

Then Edit/Paste/As New Image You should come up with something that looks like this:

If you need to resize the cut out, try this..... With your new image open, select the Deform tool from the tool bar.

This will put a box with control points around your image.

(Background added for contrast)

Now clicking and draging the control points, you can easily resize the cut out image to better fit into your new image. Pretty slick huh?

Heres a slight variation on this image. I resized it then put it inside a wood frame.

I learned how to make the frame following Keya's tutorial on Creating a Wood Frame . A very nicely done tut with excellent results, which you can judge for yourself.

Well there you go.... A pretty simple way to cut out the back ground from an image. I hope you find this tutorial helpful or informative, or both....

Here is another example  of this technique.