It is not that hard making a tube out of an object on a picture. It just takes time, care and some practice to get a good result.
I can assure you, it is worthwile!
An uncarefully cutout tube wont make anybody happy.
A tube made with love and care of someones favorite flower or pet can even make a nice present for a PSP loving friend.
Lets get to work!
Save this picture to your hard disk (by right mouse click), or find a picture you want to use from your own files.
Open the picture in PSP.
In the menu COLORS, you check if your picture has the maximum colors. If not put the colors on 16 million.
Get the magic wand tool. Put selection mode on RGBvalue, feather at 0 and tollerance at about 35.
Clik anywhere on the dark back ground of the picture.
You'll see that the mayor part of the background is now surrounded by "marching ants". By changing the tollerance value you can try selecting more or less of the background. Maybe wile holding down the shift key you must select some loose parts of background.
It is just like gardening: Take care that the ants keep off your flower!.
This would be wrong:
With the UNDO-button:
you can always go back one or more steps.
Go to the selection menu and choose the option INVERT or press this button:
to invert your selection. Using Ctrl-C & Ctrl-V you copy and paste your picture to a new one. You can close the old one.
Your Marigold will now look something like this:
Go to your View menu and take the option RESIZE or press this button: Make the image twice as large:
Now the hard work begins.
The little eraser will be our main tool now: Make the shape ROUND, the size 20, the hardness 50 and the opacity 100.
Zoom in on the part you are going to cleanse.
Carefully move the eraser round the edges to clear up the worst mess. If you went a bit to far, dont worry will bring you back a step.
Because you have the hardness set at 50 the edges become a bit softened.
After this first clean-up set the width of the eraser at 10 for a next round. You can get a bit more into the edges now. Do a next round at width 5. With the width set at 1 you can get the last dirt out of the crevices.
Dont forget to save in between cleaning rounds!
Your flower wil look somewhat like this now:
In close up it will look a bit ragged at the edges, but ddont worry, we are going to work on that now.
We start bringing the picture back to its original size.
Through the View menu and the option resize or this button cut the size in half.
that looks a lot better already!
Get your magic wand out:
Put selection mode on Opacity, feather at 0 and tolerance somewhere at 35.
clik anywhere on the transparent background. The ants should be marching round the flowers edge now.
If there is still a spot left on the background, deselect, erase it and try again.
In the Selection menu you choose modify and expand or this button. Set the amount of pixels at 1. The ants should be walking on the edge of the flower now.
Go to Effects, Blur, and choose soften. Deselect everything and you'll see your flower with a nice soft edge:
You can now make it into a tub file. Go to the File menu, choose export and picture tube or click on this button: Fill in 1 at amount of pictures horizontal, and 1 at vertical. Name your tube, OK it and Bob's your Uncle!
Maybe you want to make a multiple tube if you have more pictures of one subject.
In that case do for each picture as we did above. Instead of exporting them as picture tubes individually, you temporary save them as psp files.
Take care all the pictures are the same size. In this case we make then 150 by 150 pixels.
In this case we'll use 4 pictures.
Open a new picture with size 300 by 300 and a transparent background. In the View menu you check the option GRID. You set the grid for your picture at 150 by 150. Now copy and paste each of your pictures into their own square:
De-select everything.
You can now make it into a tub file. Go to the File menu, choose export and picture tube or click on this button: Fill in 2 at amount of pictures horizontal, and 2 at vertical, making the total amount of pictures 4. Name your tube, OK it!