Making your own "picture tubes" in PaintShop Pro

One of the things that I love to do is to make my own "picture tubes" using PSP (I have version 9).  Once an image is saved into your "tubes", you can recreate it with one click of your mouse onto any backdrop or photo or whatever background you choose. You can also change the size of the object by changing the percentage of the original size to what you wish before clicking the mouse on the spot you want to place it.

PSP comes with a few tubes already and, sometimes, you can get a deal when you purchase the program and Jasc (the software company -- now owned by "Corel") will throw in a few more just for purchasing it. You can also download tubes from many different sites around the web but, to me, there's something satisfying about making your own -- plus, you'll soon have a collection of tubes that nobody else has if you keep at it long enough...

The first step in making your own tube(s) is finding subject matter. You want to be careful here because many images are copyrighted and it's illegal to use them without permission. The best source of copyright-free images that I have found that don't cost you anything is to subscribe to the Dover Publications free newsletter. Once you sign up, you'll get in your inbox each week a page with a link to all of the free samples Dover puts up each week on their sample page. All of Dover's clip-art is guaranteed to be copyright-free for your use so you don't have to worry about stepping on any toes...

Most of the clip-art pages from Dover contain several images on one page and, bear in mind that these images are in 72 pi for convenient transmission across the web so that they must be clarified and enhanced a little in order to make good tubes. I do this this way:

After I've saved the page with the clip-art images into my "My pictures" file on my own computer, I open it in PSP. Then I go to the "Image" file tab and click on "Resize Image". This window gives you the resolution of the entire image, the number of pixels in length and in width and several ways to resize it, i.e., by dimensions in pixels or inches or percentage of the original size and by resolution. I reset the image up from 72 to about 150 with the "maintain original dimensions" box checked using the "smart size" option.

Then, I go back to my image and, under the "Adjust" file tab, I click "fade correction" (which makes more of a distinction between similar colors -- defining them more), "clarify" (which makes more of a distinction between light and dark areas) and boost the color a little under "hue & saturation".

Then I return to image and use the "selection tool" to outline the particular image that I'm interested in after "promoting the background layer". I then click "copy" and "paste as new image".

This gives me the one image that I've chosen with white "mat" all around it. This is where the "background eraser" comes in very handy. Promote the background layer on your new single-image picture and then click anywhere on the white mat that surrounds the image and hold the left mouse button down while going around the image to erase the white part.

If the image you want to separate from the white mat has a lot of white in it, you have to be very careful not to erase part of the image that you want to save when erasing the white background. You can always set the tolerance down to a finer number but then you've got to make sure that you're really getting all of the white mat to come off. Also, if your image has "holes" in it (parts of the image where the background is supposed to show through) you've got to be careful to erase those, too. To check this before I attempt to "export" the image as a "tube", I use the "magic wand" selection tool as I swipe across the image and all of those parts that still contain white matting layers will be highlighted. Then I disengage the "magic wand" by "select none" under "selections" and going back to the "background eraser" and erasing some more if I need to.

You've also got to make certain that the edges and corners get properly erased of white mat, or streaks will show up in your finished tube every time you use it on a background that isn't white.

You can use other effects on certain types of images if you like to enhance the illusion of the image being a 3-D object such as the "inner bezel" effect and/or the "drop shadow" effect.

Now, in order to make your isolated (no white mat background) image into a tube, go to "view" and click "grid". This will show you hatchmarked lines across the image that are very close together. Go to "View" again and click "change grid, guide and snap properties" and in the window that pops up, under "current image settings", I usually change the "pixels" to "inches" and, by judging the approximate width and length of the image, I change the "horizontal grids" to the width of the image in inches and likewise with the "vertical grids" to the height of the image and click "okay".

Then go back to check and make sure that the entire image is WITHIN the blank space of the two intersecting grid lines. (Any part of the image that is dissected by one of the grey grid lines will be cut off in the tube so you want to make sure that all of it is inside those two lines.)

If you want to make the tube have more than one different image every time you click, you simply place the images of similar size evenly onto a blank page and then set the horizontal and vertical grids so that they intersect in between them...

For example, I took a Dover image of a cute, Victorian swallow and, by copying and pasting it several times onto a blank page and playing with the "mirror" and "rotate" settings on each one and exporting the entire page as a tube, every time I click the tube, I get a swallow that's flying in a different direction. (If you do more than one image on a page, however, you've got to make sure that you change the settings in the next window we're going to look at...)

Now, after making certain that you've "promoted the background layer", you're ready to "export" your tube!

Go to "File" and click on "export" and "picture tube". When the window pops up, you'll see "cells across" and "cells down". If your image is just one thing, you don't have to change that; however, if you have several images on your tube (like I had with my "swallows"), you'll have to change these boxes to reflect the number of images across and down the page.

When you're satisfied that this info is correct, name your tube in the space provided and click "okay".

And that's all there is to it! You're "cookin' with gas" as we used to say!