Muted Background Tutorial

The muted background you see on this page is the one we will be making in this tutorial.

If you are new to PaintShop Pro and haven't learned the "Basics", I strongly recommend that you go back to the main "Beginners" tutorial page and do the "Basic" tutorials first.  This will make it much easier for you to follow this tutorial.

Want to learn how to make a beautiful muted background? There are several ways you can make these, but I use a wonderful program called 20/20 to mute my backgrounds. We will start out using PSP, but finish with the 20/20 program.

Things you will need:

• PSP....of course. If you don't have PaintShop Pro you can download a trial version here.

• The "20/20" program. It's free and you can download it here, then install it in it's own folder on your hard drive.

• An image. You can use the image I'm using for this tutorial, if you like. Download it here.

Getting Things Ready:

Before you begin. You need to get everything ready. If you downloaded the trial version of PSP, you will need to install it on your computer.

Then install the 20/20 program on your computer and finally unzip the image and save it in a folder on your hard drive...if you downloaded it.

Got everything ready? Okay.

Open PaintShop Pro, then open the image you want to use. You don't want to use an image that is too large or it will take a very long time to load on your page. A good size is about 250x250, but no larger than 300x300.

When you first open the image....if you're using the same one I am ( which I recommend if you are new to PSP)...you will notice that it's size is 250x275. It has a lot of "blank" space around the image and this is so we can add a Drop Shadow. Once we've added the drop shadow, we will resize the image....but that comes later. First things first. So let's get started.

1. With your image open, click on the "Color Picker" tool ...it's in the tool bar on the left.  Select a color from the floral image you want for the background color.  I used color #E5BED3.

Now look at your foreground color.  It's now the color you chose from your image.  Remember where that is?  It's on the right side of the PSP work area.  See where it says "Styles"?  The foreground is the first color under "Styles".

Now before we go any further we need to add a new layer to our floral image.  This is so we can add our background color behind the image.

2.  Click on the "Toggle Layer Palette" icon...  It at the top of your work area.  This will open the layer palette on your work area.

Now click on the title bar of the layer palette so that it opens up.  It will look like this:  

3.  Click on the icon at the far left of the layer palette....it's circled in the image above.  A new window will open....just click "ok".  Click on the title bar of the layer palette again to open it back up.  Now, instead of seeing only Layer 1, you see there are two layers.

Click on Layer 1 and while holding down your left mouse, move layer 1 up to layer 2.  Now layer 1 is on the top and layer 2 is on the bottom.  Click on layer 2 to make it the active layer.

3.  Now select the "Flood Fill" icon  .  It's in your left tool bar.

4.  Now flood fill the image with the foreground color you chose.  See how that color is behind the image?  You image should look like the one below.

 Let's add a Drop Shadow to the floral image.

5.  Click on the title bar of the layer palette again.  Now click on layer 1 to make it active.

6.Click on Effect/3D/Drop Shadow, using the settings below.

Now we need to crop some of the "blank" area from the top and bottom of our image.

7.  Double click on the Crop icon  in your left tool bar.  Using the setting below.  Then double click on the image.  Your image is now cropped.

If you used a different image, you may need to use different settings than mine....this is one reason I recommended using my image for this tutorial if you are new to PaintShop Pro.  It just makes it much easier for you to follow.

8.  Click on File/Save As.  A new window will open.  In the area at the bottom of this window, where it says "File Name" type in the name your want to save your image as.  Then in the area at the top of the window, click on the arrow and browse to the folder you want to save your image in,  then click "Save".

9.  Close PaintShop Pro.

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Our God Reigns Ministries, Tutorial by Janette