My Immortal PTU

You used to captivate me

By your resonating light

Now I'm bound by the life you left behind

Your face it haunts

My once pleasant dreams

Your voice it chased away

All the sanity in me

This tutorial was written by me on May 15th, 2012. Any resemblance to any other tutorial or tag is unintentional and is pure coincidence. Please do not claim my work as your own and do not post to any other website, blog or forum without permission from me. It is written with the assumption that you have a working knowledge of PSP and its components. I wrote it for PSP 9, but it should be compatible with most versions.

I recommend that you read through this or any tutorial you are attempting before starting it so you will know what to expect and how to get organized.

As with any of my tutorials when a plugin is required, change only the settings I recommend and leave the others on the default settings.

What you will need to accomplish this tutorial is this wicked scrap kit by my good friend and one of the most talented scrappers I know of at Hungry Hill called Dark Mistress...Alison, you rock babe.  You can purchase this kit at Creative Design Outlet HERE.  You can also purchase this Anna Marine tube at the same store HERE.  Please support the arts and DO NOT use her tubes without a license.  Plugins Xero and Eye Candy 4000.  Mask by me found right here on my blog....Trese Mask0025.  A light brush, you can download the one I used HERE.  Font of choice, I used Kingsthings Gothique.  You can download all of the wonderful Kingsthings fonts HERE.

Let's get started....

First thing you want to do is place your mask into your PSP mask folder.  Using my image as a  reference open all of your elements and your tube into PSP.  Start a 700 x 700 new white image.  We will resize later.  Next you want to put your brush into your brush folder.  This is simple to do.  Open the .png I provided into PSP.  Got to File/Export/Custom Brush, name it and save it and now it's ready to use.

Copy and paste your frame into your new image.  From this point this will be what I will refer to as your working image.  Beneath this frame layer, copy and paste your paper.  Go to your selection tool and set it on circle with a 75% feather and select the areas of the paper to the outter portions of your frame.  Go up to Selections/Invert and hit delete.  This will delete all of the areas outside your frame and since this frame has mostly open areas, a feather for the edges of your paper looks better than just cutting a circle out of it.

Now add a layer beneath this paper layer and flood fill it with the darkest black.  Apply your mask Trese Mask0025.  If you need to, use your Raster Deform tool to resize your mask to fit nicely around your frame.  This is a personal preference but may be something you will prefer yourself but keep in mind that more negative space around your work and the edges of the canvas frames the tag beautifully.  If I find that my tag is starting to fill up all the space of my canvas I simply increase the size of my canvas and resize when I'm done.  You do this by going up to Image/Canvas size.

Now again, using my image as a reference copy and paste the rest of your elements and tube into your working image.  You can resize your elements or tube to fit precisely by using your Raster Deform tool.  You will find that resizing in this manner prevents distortion and pixelation of whatever you're resizing depending how large or small you go.  To colorize the lamp go to Adjust/Hue and Saturation/Colorize and set your Saturation to Zero.  Be sure to add drop shadows keeping in mind that your shadows should appear natural.  For the tube I made my drop shadows a lot darker than I did for the elements that touch the white areas because it's against a darker background.

We're going to resize at this point.  Hide your background layer and merge your visible layers.  With your Raster Deform Tool resize your work. Unhide your background layer.  Now with your crop tool crop off the negative space around your tag but leave enough negative space to frame your work as I mentioned above if you wish.  You may have to undo and redo a couple of times until you get the desired size you want.  Including the negative space my tag above is around 600 x 600

Once you are resized, select the merged layer and go to Effects/Plugins/Xero/Radiance and use the settings below:

This adds a haunting effect to me.....

Add your name using the brightest red on one of the bows.  Be sure you Antialias is set to sharp.  Now go to Effects/Plugins/Eye Candy 4000/Gradient Glow and use the settings below:

Then go back up to Effects/Plugins/Eye Candy 4000/Corona and use the settings below:

Now add your copyright taking care that it is legal and legible.  You can have a neat and professional looking copyright by using pixel or copy fonts.  You can google them and find them all over the net.  These fonts work best at size 6 with your antialias off.  For the © symbol hold down your ALT key and hit 0169.

Now for the animation part.  Add a layer above your merged layer and apply your light brush. You will need to resize this dramatically.  Easily done by using your raster deform tool.  You will find some areas around this brush that are squared off simply use your selection tool with the same feather as above and select small parts of these areas and delete the squared looking edges.  Place this brush over the light being sure it's over the bulb and duplicate it twice for a total of three brush layers.  Hide the bottom two layers.  Making sure you are on the top brush layer, go to Effects/Plugins/Eye Candy 4000/Corona and use the settings below:

Hide this layer, unhide the middle brush layer and use these same settings only hit the Random Seed button once.  Once applied hide this layer and unhide the bottom brush layer and do the same.  Now open Animation Shop...

In PSP hold down SHIFT + CTRL and hit C and go over to Animation Shop and hit CTRL + v to paste a new animation.  Back to PSP, hide the bottom light brush layer and unhide the middle brush layer.  Hold down SHIFT + CTRL and hit C and go back to Animation Shop.  This time hold down SHIFT + CTRL and hit L to paste after current frame.  Do the same for the last brush layer.  Resize further if desired, save as a .gif and you're done.

Thank you for trying my tutorial.  I hope you gained something useful to help in honing your PSP skills and that you enjoyed it.  Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or for issues with broken links, etc.

Blessing, Trese