Paint Shop Pro 5 Tutorial

Flood Fill Tricks

You will need for something like this image, two different background photos. I then had the dancers that were the focus of my image. There were to images of dancers.

You will want to make sure that the two background photos are approxiametely the same size height and width.

My two bacground images are 900WX720H when I start working with them. My dancers are 594WX674H. (Resized here for quick loading purposes.)

To begin with you will only need the two background photos open. You need to duplicate these images so you are not working on your originals in case of errors. To do that you need to click on the "Window" menu at the top of your screen and then click on "Duplicate". Do this for both images and close the originals.

For this example I used the "Western" type image as my main canvas and blocked the sky in with white. You can do that using the flood fill tool.

Once you think you have the sky pretty well finished blocked in you will need to select the flood fill tool, then choose pattern from the control pallette, and choose the second background image as the pattern. Once you have done that flood fill the area you just finished blocking in. And using the flood fill tool, flood fill the little areas that you missed with the white. You will see those along the horizon of the first image.

Now it is time to open up your main focus images. Those images that are the subject of the picture. For this example I am using square dancers and have two images I need to open. Remember always not to work on the original image. Make duplicates and close the originals. You need to flood fill the backgrounds of the main focus images also. To make this easier on the images that I am using, since I don't want the musical notes, I will use the selection tool to select an area around the dancers, click on edit, click on copy, then click on edit, then Paste, then Paste as a new image. I will then flood fill the images.

So they end up looking like this.

Now, for what I am doing I want four dance pairs so I will duplicate each image. Then on the duplicates I will mirror them so they look like they are a different angle. Do do this click on the "Image" menu, then mirror.

Now, you need to have white in the lower box on the color selections on the right side of your screen, then for both images, click on "Colors", then "Set Transparency". When the next screen comes up prompting you if you want to reduce the image to 1 layer and 256 colors, click on ok, then on the next screen choose "Optimized Octree" and then ok. When the next screen comes up choose "Set transparency to the background color". Now, to see if it worked properly click on "Colors", then "View Transparency". Once you ok that you should see a checkerboard background instead of a white background. Now, you are ready for the last step.

Last thing to do is copy each one and paste them as a "transparent selection" on the main image. You may need to do touch up, but for the most part the image is done.

To see the full size click on the image. Full size = 57K