In this tutorial, we are going to learn to use the mask feature of Paint Shop Pro X to cut out portions of one image and add them to another, sometimes called "super-imposing".

For example, we are going to take this image:

cut out only the people and add them to this image:

and end up with this image:

This is easy to do in PSP X as you will see.

First, lets look at my work area.

On the left we see the actual work area.
On the ride side, top, we have the materials or color palette
And just below that we have the Layer palette.

We will be working with the layers feature to do the cut out work of the people and adding them to the park image, thats why I have it open. To access it, you should be able to press F-8 on your keyboard.

Now I know, there are several methods you can use to accomplish this, but I like using the mask method because it allows me to easily correct mistakes as I'll demonstrate later in the tutorial.

OK, lets begin by opening the image of the people:

What we want to do is create a mask, using the layer feature of PSP X that we will use as a sort to stencil to cut only the people from this image.

So from the menu bar select Layer/New Mask Layer/Hide All.

You will notice several things have happened to your work space.

First, your materials palette has changed to a 256 grsayscale color palette

Also a checkerboard has appeared over the image.

And finally your layer palette has changed

OK, from the menu bar select Layers/View Overlay. Now your checkerboard has taken on a red hue....

Lets take a minute to look at these changes and what they mean.....

First, the mask. A mask is like a clear sheet of plastic that covers your image. Now there are other sites on the web that can provide you with the real techincal aspects of masks, so I'll keep it really simple here.

Think of your mask as a stencil. As you can see in the changed layers palette, the mask is depicted as a black square. Everything covered in that black area has zero visibility and can't be seen.

We are going to use our paintbrush tool to remove the mask from the areas we want to be visible. The red overlay actually depicts the black area of the mask. But where the heck did our image go?

Look on your layer palette on the tab for the mask. To the right of the black square you will notice 2 icons, one of which looks like an eye. Placing your mouse over it will display a tooltip that says visibility toggle. Well click on that icon.

Presto, there's your picture of the people, covered by the red overlay.

Now I said the red overlay actually depicts the black area (zero visibility) of the mask, and is red so we can see throught it. So what we want to do is use our paintbrush to remove the red overlay from only those areas of the image we want to be visible.

You remove the red overlay by painting in white and you can add red overlay by painting in black. So you want to be sure your foreground color is set to white and your background color is set to black.

Now select your paintbrush tool

these are the settings I used

Now zoom in on the image and being to paint out the red area. I usually do the outline first, and than remove the red overlay from the center.

Now we have the opportunity to make sure those little devil horns behind the womans head don't show up in our finished image. We simply leave them covered up. Remember you remove only the red overlay from those portions of the image you want to be able to see later on.

But suppose our hand jumps while we are painting out the red, and those devil horns are uncovered.

Well thats easy to fix. Simply click that little 2 headed arrow on the color palette

To swap the foreground/background colors, so now your foreground is black, and paint over the area you don't want to be able to see.

Now that you have the idea, go ahead and finish removing the red overlay from the people. Like I said, I usually use a small brush tip to work on the outline and than increase the size to quickly remove the red from the middle of the image.

You should have something that looks like this:

OK, now we have the people uncovered, so lets select them. From the menu bar select Selections/From Mask.

Your image should look something like this:

Now, make sure you select the Raster1 tab on your layer palette next

Now from the menu bar select Edit/Copy to copy your selection to the clipboard.

If you want you can minimize the people image now, and open the gazeebo image.

From the menu bar select Edit/Paste as New Layer to paste your cut out people into the image of the park.

Now because the people are on their own layer and not yet part of the background, you can move them around easily.

Select the Pick tool on your tool bar. It looks like an arrow. There is a little down aarow on this tool that allows you to make 2 choices. Pick the Mover. The Mover tool looks like a 4 headed arrow and allows you to move your people all over the image.

The Pick tool places a deformation box around the layer.

This allows you to resize the layered image if you wish, to make it more easily fit into the prespective of the image.

Or not! :)

Well there you go.... I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

You can Download this tutorial if you wish. This will have the full and thumbnailed versions of the images used in this tutorial.