Picture in a Tube

Materials Needed:

PSP 7.x - Get it here

Eye Candy 4 - Get it here

Horse Head Tube - I got mine from GraphicBuds, available here

Running Horses Tube - available on the this page from GB

Sea and Sky Picture - I used Dee's Tutorial here - ****Note - read Step #1 of this Photo in a Tube tutorial before doing the sea and sky one as you may want to use different dimensions than in Dee's tut.

1. Do your Sea and Sky tutorial at Dee's. For this image, I made mine 1200 x 600 pixels because of the way I wanted to place my horse head - I wanted to get part of the shiny sea part in it and the only way was to make the image HUGE. Also, at the end, I blended using screen to get the lighter image but did not lower the opacity like the tutorial does.

2. Add a new raster layer and lay your horse head tube down, sized at 250. (it will be a bit blurry but don't worry about that, it will not matter in the end)

3. Effects--->Texture Effects---> Emboss.

4. Eye Candy 4, Glass - use the following settings:

5. Lower the opacity of this layer to around 20% and use your mover tool to put it where you want on the sea and sky background image. (how much you lower the opacity will depend on the image you are using and personal preference.

6. This is where I put in the tube of the running horses. I added a layer in between the background and the horse head, put the tube down, mirrored it and placed it where I wanted. Then I lowered the opacity to about 40%.

7. Make sure you are on the horse head layer. Click on the area outside the horse head with your magic wand (make sure your tolerance and feather are both set to 0). Selections--->Modify--->Expand by about 3 pixels. Click on your background (sea and sky) layer. Edit--->Clear or just hit your Delete key. Do not deselect.

8. Your edges are quite jagged, so we need to smooth them out. Selections--->Modify--->Expand by 3 again. Click on your retouch tool and use the following settings:

Go around the outside edge of the horse head - you may need to go over it more than once. You can change the opacity to get different degrees of the soften factor. You might find it easier to add a bottom layer and flood fill it with black to make it easier to see. Having the horse head selected, ensures that you do not soften too far in from the edge - my hands are not always steady doing these things!

8. When you are done with the edges, merge visible your layers (delete the black layer first if you used one), crop it down to get rid of the big open space and you can use the finished image any way you like. Here's how I did mine: I put it on a black background and then added a border of 10. I used a colour from the image. Finally, I used an inner bevel (I used Super Blade Pro with Mardiweb's bevel_soft as I prefer it to PSP's bevels, but that's just my own preference)

Enjoy!

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