Polaroid Frame with transparent background in Paint Shop Pro X2
I made this picture this morning. I made the polaroid frame from scratch, rotated it and kept the background transparent. If anyone is interested I can post a tutorial on this.
Instructions are below the cut:
Making a Polaroid picture In Paint Shop Pro.
1. Choose picture and crop to a square. I used 300px by 300px but any size will work as long as you size the frame to match.
2. Create a new raster image using white. This will be the Polaroid frame. I sized it to 320px by 380px.(this allowed 10 px for the frame on each side of the picture.
3. I copied the original picture and pasted in as a new layer on the white frame and then moved the picture up to the top so that there was only a tiny bit of white showing around the picture at the top and sides and a large space at the bottom which allows a spot to write the caption.
4. I then went to the Effects menu. I chose 3D effects – then Buttonize with the following settings to place a shadow around the image. Height:5 Width:5 Opacity: 80 Edge –Transparent and I used a fairly light grey – the darker the colour, the darker the shadow.
5. Add your text.
6. Next I rotated the image. I chose the Image menu, then Free Rotate with the following settings (of course –right works too and the degrees are your choice for how much tilt your want on the image: Direction: left Degrees: free :15 All layers - check box This will leave you with a rotated image on a black background.
7. Now because you do not want the black background showing , you have to make it transparent. Since I had some black showing in the rest of my image and you can only make one colour transparent, I chose to change the black to a bright green since that colour wasn’t in the image I was working with. (so choose any colour that will work). To do this I used the Colour Replacer Tool with the following settings: Shape: round or square Size: this was a fairly good size picture so I chose 800 so I could change the colour of the whole background at once. Hardness: 100 Step: 1 Density: 100 Thickness: 100 Rotation: 0 Tolerance: 100 You will be left with the picture surrounded by a bright green (or the colour of your choice).
8. Next go to the File menu and go down to Export – Gif Optomizer (image must be saved as a gif file to have a transparent background. A page will come up with several tabs. For this image use the first tab - Transparency and choose these settings: a. Areas that match this colour: Point to the background colour and your eyedropper tool will appear and click to choose as the colour to be transparent. b. set tolerance fairly low so that the rest of your image will not be effected. I chose 10 but any low value may work as long as the background is one colour and that colour does not appear in the image. c. Choose OK and save the image with a new name and as a gif file. You will notice that the image appears to have a black background but actually that that is the transparent colour.
9. Upload your image to scrapbook or photobucket or your favourite host and post to your journal and you should have a Polaroid picture tilted and floating on your page.