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Mastering Corel Photopaint's Image Sprayer. Part 2
by David Wiles
Getting your hands dirty - creating your own image sprayers.
With autumn just around the corner for those of you living in the northern hemisphere, I felt that a image list of fallen leaves would be an ideal subject to tackle.
Here in the southern hemisphere we have already had our share of autumn (and winter) and I have had an abundance of fallen oak leaves (in huge piles) in my back yard. I collected a handful and took them to a friend with a scanner and had them scanned in. I put them at different angles and in the last scan I turned all the leaves upside down. Nowhere in nature do autumn leaves fall "butter-side-up", at least not in MY backyard!
You can download my original files for this tutorial. [download master ZIP'ped file]
Remember that I mentioned in the first part of this tutorial that all Image Sprayer image lists contain a list of separate objects. Basically this means that an Image list is simply a Corel Photopaint file with a group of separate paint objects on it. Loading an image list as an ordinary Corel PhotoPaint file will look like this:
You can no doubt see that each leaf in the list has been masked out, and is treated as a separate object. Now with this in mind, here's how I went about creating an image mask for each leaf:
1. Select the Mask Tool and click on the small black flyout arrow to get the mask tool types. Now select the Lasso Mask tool from the options available.
2. Set the HSB (Hue-Saturation-Balance) tolerance (on the Properties Toolbar above) to 25 to allow a tight masking of the leaf. Also switch the anti-aliasing button on to avoid the "jaggies" on the selected object. Once these settings are activated, hold down the left mouse button and drag and draw around one of the leaf images. You can click-drag-click as well to use the Lasso Mask tool in "rubber-band" mode. The choice of methods is yours. Once the circle is completed, double-click the left mouse button to release the Lasso mask tool.
3. The resultant masked area should look something like this:
4. Now you may notice that there are small areas that haven't been included in the mask. See the small white area at the top of the leaf? Adding additional areas to the mask are easy.
First select the Magic Wand tool from the flyout Mask Tool (1), then select the Subtractive mode from the Mask options in the Properties bar. (2) This will remove part of the mask from the existing area. Now set the Tolerance to 25, so as to ensure that the entire spot and its surrounding pixels are included. (3) Finally move your cursor (now a "magic wand") onto the area that you want to remove from the mask and if you click correctly., the small white hole in the leave will be removed from the mask. Note: you may have to click a few times to get the right area. (The "hotspot" of the magic wand cursor is in the top left hand corner of the cursor.) I often find that zooming in allows me to get the spot right away!
5. After selecting all the extra areas not included in the original Lasso masking, you are now ready for turning the leaf into a "floating" object. Before you do this I suggest switching on the Mask Overlay tool on the top Toolbar to show the mask in red. (similar to the old rubylith masking used by printers before the advent of DTP and computers.)
6. Pressing Ctrl-C or selecting the Edit...Copy menu item will now copy the area not included with the mask (all the non-red areas) to the Windows clipboard as an object.
You are now ready to create your image list using your first mask.