Project3.Light BoxSlides


Project 3. Light Box/Slides

One of the things I love about digital cameras is their immediacy. If you have the same kind of reaction to being asked to draw something, as in the previous project, to being told you have to have dental surgery, then this project is for you. All you have to do is shoot some photos.

This project is similar to the last one, and you can use either technique on either project. It's kind of neat how that works out. Instead of drawing the frame of the Polaroid, we'll be shooting some photos of photos. Or, to be more precise, we'll shoot a couple of slides.

See the final project in this chapter for a quick and easy way to duplicate the effect in this project using some of the built-in frames Paint Shop Pro offers. These frames can be found under Image, Picture Frame.


To help in the process of trimming the shots later, shoot the slides against a plain paper background. Here's how I got the shot of my slides.

I placed a couple of sheets of laser printer paper on the floor and set a couple of my slides on top of the paper, carefully, of course. I then attached the flash and aimed the camera at the floor from above, trying to keep the camera fairly level. You can see the result in Figure 11.17. I had to shoot about five or six times, making adjustments in between shots to get the right photo, so don't be disappointed if it takes you a few tries.

Figure 11.17. A photo of a couple of mounted slides.


Notice how the photo is dark enough that you can't see the image. That's not important, though. All we need is the image of the slide mounts themselves.

1.

Remove the background. Use any method you like. You might be able to simply select the background area with the Magic Wand (try playing with the Tolerance setting), or you can use the Background Eraser tool to remove the background.

When the background has been removed, you can also remove the slide images from the inside of the slide mounts. You should end up with only the mounts showing on their own layer. You can, of course, add a white layer below to mimic a light box below your digital slides (see Figure 11.18).

Figure 11.18. The digital light box and empty slide mounts.


Adding a Mask

As with the previous project, you can now build a mask to allow images to show through the slide mounts as though they were mounted slides.

In case you've just dropped in, here's how you can add that masked group to hold the digital images you want to use a slides:

2.

Click the uppermost layer to make it activeit should be the layer with your slide mounts. Click the arrow next to the icon in the upper-left corner of the Layers palette and select New Raster Layer. Click OK and then add a new layer group the same way. Rename the Group Slides and Mask.

3.

Right-click the raster layer you created and select New Mask Layer, Hide All.

4.

Select the Magic Wand tool, set the mode to Add, and make the Slide Mount layer active. Click inside the mounts to select both areas.

5.

Make the new mask layer active, select the Flood Fill tool, and fill the selected area of the mask with white. Be sure to click in both areas.

6.

Place some images into layers below the mask within the Slides and Mask group to have them appear as mounted slides (see Figure 11.19). Note that the images you paste in might need to be resized so that they look good inside the slide templates. This can be done using the Pick tool.

Figure 11.19. The digital light box and a couple of digital slides.


Here are some other ideas to try: Resized and with the proper images (and I'll leave it up to you to decide what proper images might mean), these would make great buttons for a website. You could put up vacation photos or pictures of the holidays or the grandkids. This would even work for sites that feature photos from parties or for budding photographers.

One thing you could try with this project is adding a drop shadow to the slide mounts to add some depth to the final image.




Corel Paint Shop Pro X Digital Darkroom
Corel Paint Shop Pro X Digital Darkroom
ISBN: 0672328607
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 109

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