Master Smithy Mithrin's PSP Flood Fill Tutorial

In this tutorial you will learn how to use the Flood Fill tool. Below are the 7 pictures that you can use to help understand this tutorial. From now on I will refer to them as Pic1 to Pic.7 The two images we are going to use in this tutorial are Pic.1 and Pic.2. Picture one shows the fantasy image and Picture 2 shows the border that we want to have on top of it. Time to get started.

First of all open the two images Pic.1 and Pic.2 in Paint Shop Pro. There are a few things that you need to be aware of. First of all the border will overlap some parts of the fantasy image so take notice of that when you crop your base picture so that the border won't overlap a face or something else important. Trial and error is probably the best learning method here. Notice that both pics have the same size. Both are 500 pixels wide and 175 pixels high. Now you don't need to crop your base image to exactly the same size but I have found it very easy to do that since you immediately get an idea of how your image will look.

Now select the Flood Fill button and click on the Foreground and Stroke Properties button in the Materials window. (Pic.3) A new window will popup. Click on Patterns and then on the square picture marked with a red arrow in Pic.4.

Now you will see yet another new window that displays all sorts of texture patterns. You could pick any of these but for this tutorial you will need to select the fantasy picture. Why? Because that is the picture that you will use together with the Flood Fill tool and using a Pattern to do that is the easiest way. So browse to the top of the window and you will see the images you have opened in Paint Shop Pro there as well as all the standard textures. Click on the picture FloodFillTut01.jpg. (Pic.5)You will see it selected now. Then you have two more options to the right of the selection. Angle and Scale. Angle simply allows you to rotate the selected Pattern while Scale will allow you to scale the Pattern to whatever you like best. Use 100 to stick to the original size of the Pattern.

Ok there is one more thing I would like to explain before we move on. Click on the Pattern Selection again and notice that there are a few buttons at the top of the window. I want you to click on the File Locations button (Pic.5 red arrow). In the new window (Pic.6) you will see File Types. Notice that Patterns is selected now. This is obviously because we are working with Patterns. Now let's say you have a nice collection of artistic textures on your harddisk and you have placed them all in one folder and would like to add them to the standard Patterns in Paint Shop Pro. To do that click on the Add button next to the Pattern file folders field and browse to your folder. Select it and click on OK. Notice that Paint Shop Pro loads your new textures. You can also remove them from here if you want to do that. Handy eh?

Ok now go back to the Material Properties window. Make sure that you still have the correct Pattern selected and click on ok. You should still have the Flood Fill button selected on the left toolbar. Let's explain some options available with this tool. You will see the following options at the top toolbar.
Presets, Match mode, Tolerance, Sample Merged, Blend Mode and Opacity. (Pic.7)

Preset: There is only one standard preset for this tool. So not much to explain there.

Match mode: Here you have a few important selections. This determined how the area that you want to be filled will be filled.

·    None: has no matching criteria and so fills all pixels.
·    RGB: fills contiguous pixels that match the red, green, and blue values
·    Color: fills contiguous pixels that match the hue and saturation values.
·    Hue: fills contiguous pixels that match the hue value.
·    Brightness: fills contiguous pixels that match the brightness.
·    All Opaque: fills all pixels that are opaque (not transparent).
·    Opacity: fills contiguous pixels that match the opacity

Tolerance: This will let you choose how closely the selected pixels must match the initial pixel you click. It ranges from 0 to 200. At 0 only pixels with very similar colors are filled. The higher the settings the more pixels will be filled.

Sample Merged: Select this if you want to use the Flood Fill Tool on all layers.Unselect it if you only want to work on one layer.

Blend Mode: Here you can again select a few different blend modes. For now just select normal but feel free to fool around with it a bit.

Opacity: Here you set the opacity for the fill. At 100% opacity, the paint fills everything while at 1% opacity, the paint is almost transparent.

Now for this tutorial set Match Mode to RGB Value, Tolerance to 50, uncheck Sample merged (we are only using one layer after all), set Blend Mode to normal and Opacity to 100. Time to fill up the spaces between the borders inPic.2 Then select the border picture and click in the center of the picture, between the borders. Notice That a huge part of the image gets filled with the fantasy image. You will see that the Flood Fill Tool stops at the first border so we're not done yet.Now click between the other borders and nd in the small areas near the corners of the border picture. That should do the trick and give you this result.