Tubing Tips

Whiskers generally extend beyond the animal you are tubing as you have probably noticed. To avoid having any of the background color appear in the whiskers, rather than trying to use the Freehand Tool to select and delete, the easiest way is to delete them entirely! However, before doing that, follow these steps.

First, add a new raster layer. We will be drawing our whiskers on this layer. We want to match the color of the whiskers first. Take your Color Picker tool and click on the whiskers to get the right color. This color will be your foreground color. Set your background color to null. Next, click on your Pen Tool. With PSP8 and up, you have the ability to set the width of your line to less than 1.00 which is wonderful for whiskers! See screen shot below for my settings for the cat whiskers.

On your new layer, click at the beginning of the existing whisker and follow the whisker to the end. When you have finished one whisker, go to the Pen Tool toolbar and click "apply". Then move to the next whisker, draw following the whisker of the cat again, press apply when done.

Continue as above until you have the whiskers drawn. If the whiskers took a little too much lines, in order for them to look more life-like, go to Adjust, Blur. Click on Gaussian Blur and set the amount to .70 (sometimes I set this as low as .50, see what looks best on your particular image). This setting slightly softens the whiskers. Don't merge your layers until you are completely finished with the image.

If you wish your animal to appear more life-like, try using the Smudge Tool! Depending upon the size of the image, I set the Size of my brush from 4 to 7. Otherwise, the rest of the settings below stay the same.

Take your mouse and pull out away from the animal in short strokes. Don't move the mouse back and forth but keep moving it around the animal, pulling out the fur along the way. This is somewhat time-consuming but such a natural effect on your tube!

After you have completed your smudging, check your tube by clicking on Selections, Select All, the using your Freehand Tool, click on the animal. What I do to smooth out the fur is take the Freehand Tool and make a selection just along the tops of the area pulled out (see below for a visual of what I am talking about).

I hit the delete key 2 or 3 times and continue around the image until done. This may not be necessary but I find the fur looks smoother and there is less chance for a "ghost pixel" or "floatie" to appear this way. Thanks to Eileen Wormald for this tip! Here is my finished kitty.

If you have an image of a car, for example, that you want to tube, it looks really nice if the glass on the car (windshield and other windows) is transparent instead of retaining the color of your background. Again, thanks to Eileen Wormald, there is a technique that you can use to do this!

After you have removed the background around your image and you know it is all clean (see Tubing page for checking your image), take the Freehand Tool and carefully go around inside your transparent area (the sample I am using is a car).

Now when you have selected the area to your satisfaction, go to Selections, Promote Selection to a Layer.

Make sure you are on the image layer, NOT the Promoted Selection layer, and hit the delete key 3 or 4 times. Now click on the Promoted Selection Layer and turn down the opacity of that layer to about 35. The setting you use really depends upon the background. The darker it is the lower the opacity number. On this car, I had three promoted layers as you can see. I took each section at a time. When you are finished with the glass, turn off the background layer, and merge visible.

I hope these tips are helpful to you. As I learn more, I will add to this section.