CYBIA HI-SPOT
Plugin

It's early summer. The backyard has burst into bloom. I have to take photos of the blossoms! Being an avid PSPer, I have to share these flowers in some way, yes?

I can only make so many tubes of the 'one perfect pink rose.' It was time to find another use for the photos - another way to display them - lest I bore everyone I know with yet another flower photo album.

I especially liked this rose - and knew there had to be a way to show off her beauty in a way that would not be redundant.

Paint Shop Pro and Cybia Hispot filter to the rescue.

Materials needed:
Paint Shop Pro - any version will work.


Cybia Hispot (Install to your plugin folder before opening PSP)

Background photo. Download my photo here.

Tube of choice. I used a misted tube done by MarioC.

Thank you, Marcio for permission to use your tubes in my tutorials!  Your work is awesome!

You can download the tube here.

Font: Borealis - a commercial font that can be found here. (Any font can be substituted for this font, so don't run out to buy a commercial font for a single tutorial.) 

I left the photo and the tube at their original sizes, because they fit so well together.

I use a script to resize my work at 90% intervals six times and sharpen the image in one step. If you don't already have the script, download it here, place it in MY PSP FILES > Scripts - Restricted folder. As large as the images are, I ran the script twice on both the background and tube images. If you don't want to use a script, resize your images in small increments, sharpening as needed along the way. By resizing several times at 90% at a time, most often, there's no need to sharpen the image . The script eliminates the redundant steps of mousing to Image>Resize a dozen times.

Let's get started!

Open your selected tube and the floral background you plan to use.

Use Shift + D to duplicate both images and close your originals to use another day.

I resized the floral background to 480 X 430 pixels and the misted tube to 295 X 380.

Delete any extra watermark or sig layers in your tube.
Minimise the tube for now.

Start with the floral background.

Trim your background to your liking.
Use the Selection Tool > Rectangle > Feather 2.
Draw a rectangle around the area you want to keep.

Image > Crop to Selection.

The feathering adds a tiny outline around your background layer when you flatten it later.

Layers > Promote Background Layer
Layers > Duplicate
Effects > Plugins > Fotomatic > Hi-Spot using these settings:

Lower the opacity of the top layer to 84%.  If you want, you can lower the opacity of your bottom layer to reduce the color and contrast.  I did not.

Open your tube.
Apply H-ispot to your tube using the same settings as above.

Edit > Copy

Click back on your floral image.
Edit > Paste as New Layer.

Use the Mover Tool to position the tube layer where you want it. I moved the tube to the upper left corner.

Change the Tube Layer properties to Screen and lower the opacity to 52%.

Add a text message or your signature. 

Choose two colors from the adjusted rose layer - I chose grey #5d5b5a for the foreground and pink #f0ccdd for the background color.

Font I used: Borealis - Size 36 - Stroke width 1

Convert to a raster layer and add a subtle drop shadow

Add your watermark.

Layers > Merge > Merge All (flatten)

Resize and export as a jpg.

I hope you enjoyed doing the tut and learning yet another way of using this wonderful plugin as much as I did.

vetch