PSP Tuts & Tags By Q: February 2014

This tutorial was written on 02/11/2014 and assumes you have working knowledge of PSP. Any simularities to other tuts is purely coincidental and not done on purpose.

For this tutorial you will need:

PSP - I use X3 but most versions will do

Tube of choice, I used the art of Matt Busch

You can purchase this tube at CDO. Do not use without purchasing a license first.

Template by KyLie, available at Creative Misfits

Eye Candy 4000, Glass

DBS Flux, Bright Noise

Font of choice, I used Rehotalko

Open your tube and template, duplicate both and close the originals. On the template delete copyright layer. Click on your background layer and promote to raster. Go to Image, Canvas Size. Keep the width what it is, but change the height to 700. Click the down arrow so that the placement will be at the top, then click ok.

Now I'm going to change the colors of the template to suit my tube. Change your foreground color to a color from your tube. I picked a nice blue from her hat. Before you click ok, take note of the H and S numbers. On mine H is 141, S is 118:

Now let's start from the bottom up, click on your mask layer. Then go to Adjust, Hue and Saturation, Colorize and put those numbers in the box like so:

Click ok and now your mask matches your tube color. Repeat on these layers:

Triple Rect Frames Gradient Glow
Rectangle
Circle
Music Notes

Or you can do each of those 4 layers a different color, it's up to you. Hide your wordart and glitter wordart layers for now so they'll be out of the way for the next step.

Activate your Circle layer, copy your tube and paste as a new layer on your template. Arrange it where you want it to sit. Mine is cropped on the left and bottom sides so to make it easier to arrange, I moved it under the circle layer so I could make sure the cropped parts would be covered. When I had it where I wanted it, I moved it back above the circle layer again.

Now that you have your tube where you want it to be, duplicate it. Give the duplicate a Gaussian blur of 3. Now activate the original. Select all, float, defloat and invert. Click on the duplicate and press delete one time. Deselect. Then click on the original once more and go to Xero, Porcelain and use the default settings but change the blue slider to 0. Now activate the duplicate again and change the blend mode on the duplicate to soft light and reduce the opacity to 60%. You might want to use a different blend mode and opacity to fit your tube.

So now I'm going to give my bottom tube layer a drop shadow. I used -3, 3, 60, 10. Hide the duplicate for now and lower the opacity of your original tube to about 50% so you can see what you're doing in the next step.

Activate your circle layer and click on your freehand selection tool. Set it to point to point, feather at 0. Now you're going to start on one side, going around the black circle, down and around to the other side so any part of the frame that you want on top of your tube is selected, like so:

Now promote selection to layer and deselect. Move this layer above your duplicate tube, which you can now unhide and return the opacity of the original to 100% again.

Now using your freehand selection tool again, you're going to carefully select on the black circle and then any parts of the tube that go outside the circle that you want to remove:

Make sure one of your tube layers is active, press delete. Activate the other tube layer and press delete again and deselect.

Now let's give the template layers drop shadows. I used 0, 0, 100, 10 on the glitter circle frame. On the
rectangle frame I changed the blur to 5. Or as an option you can merge the two rectangle frames together and then give it a drop shadow. Whatever looks best for your tag.

Unhide the wordart and glitter wordart layers. Move these 2 layers below your original tube layer. Give the glitter wordart layer the same drop shadow you did the glitter circle frame.

I left the triple rectangles alone cause a drop shadow just didn't look right with the glow that's on there already.

I decided to give the musical notes a slight gradient glow and then the drop shadow used before.

Now I felt my mask could be bigger so I activated that layer, clicked on my raster deform tool and using the nodes, dragged it up and to the right so you can see it better and so it extends a bit above my tube. When you're happy with how it looks, click on your crop tool and click on Snap crop rectangle to: layer opaque. Make sure none of your tube or template will get cropped off cause that just looks awful! Click the green check mark or double click on your tag to crop.

If you plan to resize your tag, now is the time to do it. I resized mine 80%.

Activate the top layer in your palette, should be the music notes. Add your copyright info, license and taggers mark.

Add your name using colors from your tube. I used the blue that I chose for the colorization for my background and a darker blue for the foreground. Convert to raster.

Select all, float, defloat, expand selection by 3. Add a new raster layer and flood fill with white. Go to DBS Flux, Bright Noise and give it noise at 80 with Mix selected. Move this layer under your name layer. Activate the name layer and go to Eye Candy 4000, Glass and give it a bevel: