This tut was written in PSP X3, but can be done in other versions too. This is a rewrite of a tutorial that I wrote back in 2006.
I used the awesome artwork of Meredith Dillman. You must have a license to use her work. I purchased this tube from CILM before it closed, unfortunately I don't believe she's currently selling anywhere.
Supplies needed:
Tube of your choice, something with pretty fall colors would work well
Font of your choice, I used Harrington
Reflet Program here
Reflet is a stand alone program. Make a folder for it in your program files and unzip the files there. Then right click on the exe file and make a shortcut to put on either your desktop, in your start menu, or in My Documents
Animation Shop
Open a new 550 x 550 transparent workspace. Flood fill white. Open the 2 masks and your tube in psp, minimize for now. Remember to save often.
Select 2 colors from your tube. I used #b5561a for the foreground and #ffe558 for the background. Then click on the foreground box and click on Gradient and use these settings.
Add a new raster layer and flood fill with your gradient. Go to Layers, New Mask Layer, From Image. Find the dmsk mask in the drop down box and click ok. Merge group. Resize 90%, all layers unchecked.
Now click on your foreground box again and click the box to invert the gradient. Add a new raster layer, flood fill with the inverted gradient and this time apply the Vix mask. Merge group. You should now have something like this.
Now give both mask layers a slight drop shadow of 1, 1, 40, 2. This gives our trees a bit of depth.
Activate the top layer in your palette and copy your tube and paste as a new layer. Use the mover tool to arrange it where you want it to go. Give your tube a darker drop shadow of -2, 2, 50, 8.
Now activate the white background layer. Click on your crop tool and click Snap Crop Rectangle to: Layer Opaque.
Now you're going to click the bottom center node and drag it up cause we're going to cut off the bottom part of the trees. If it's going to remove too much of your tube then click on your mover tool and move your tube and then go back and crop again.
Drag the top middle node down too to get rid of the excess white on top. Double click to crop the excess. Make sure you don't cut off any part of the top of the masks. You should now have something like this.
Activate the top layer in your palette again. We're going to resize the entire thing 70%, all layers checked. Go to Adjust, Sharpness and click Sharpen one time. Just on the tube layer.
Now add your copyright information, and watermark if you use one. Select your font and add your name. You can use the same colors you used for your gradient or pick different colors from your tube. Give it any effects if you want, I gave mine a drop shadow of 1, 1, 70, 2.
When you're all done Shift D to make a duplicate. Working on just the duplicate, hide all the top layers above your tube. Mine has 4 layers, the copyright, the licence, my watermark and my name. Merge all and save as jpg, doesn't need a fancy name, it's just temporary. We do this so we don't alter our original in case we need to go back and make changes.
Open up your Reflet program. Click the folder icon and open your jpg you just saved. I saved mine on the desktop to make it easier to find. You can click on the middle icon to play the animation to see how it looks. If satisfied, click on the 3rd button, looks like a disk. Use these settings.
Click ok, notice it's being saved as a gif this time. When it asks if you want to create an html page for test, just click no. You can now close Reflet, we're done with it.
Open up Animation Shop. Open your little gif that you just made in Reflet. Select All and then go up and click on Propogate Paste.
Now let's go back to psp and our tag with all the layers still intact. Let's start with the top layer that should be your name. Copy and go to AS and paste as a new animation. Then your going to click on your name, and drag it onto your tag and drop it where you want it to go, would look best if it's approximately the same location you have it in psp. If you goof, you can undo and start over. Make sure though before you drag and drop again that all frames have been selected. We want it to put the name in all 5 frames.
Now back to psp. Repeat this process with the copyright, license and watermark layer(s).
Play your animation to see how it looks, then save as a gif. Congrats, you're all done!
Tutorial ©2006, 2011 Queina. All rights reserved. Any simularities to any other tutorials is purely coincidental.
