Paint Shop Pro "Dreamy" Effect
Have you ever seen banners that look "dreamy", that have a hazy picture like the one above? I'm going to teach you to do just that. If you have Paint Shop Pro, or any other program that is similar, please open it now. Copy and paste an image like this as your new workspace:
Your graphics program should now look somewhat like this:
First thing you need to do is change the color depth from 256 colors (as in this picture) to 16 million colors.
Once you have changed the color depth, you color palette should now look as shown below (circled in red). Now you are able to select the option "Duplicate Layer" in the layer pannel. Please do that now. Once you have clicked "Duplicate Layer", you should now have an additional layer titled "Copy of Backround".
Now you can get to the fun part! Now you add the Gaussian Blur" effect to the image, as shown below.
A screen should now pop up like the image shown below. It is easiest to set the radius to 3.00. Press "OK".
If you've pressed OK, you're probably dissapointed. Your image should now look like shown below, blurred:
But no worries! This is how your image is supposed to look. We just need to ajust the opacity of the layer for the finishing touch. You can do so by clicking the bar next to the eye next to your desired layer in the layer panel, like the image below. clicking your mouse down to the middle the bar should make the blurriness decrease, but not entirely, to make it look "dreamy".
If you want to be more precise with your opacity levels, follow the illustrations shown below.
Now, your image should look like this:
Cool, huh? But we have one last step to go. We have to merge the layers together, in other words, squish them all into one fantastic layer of squishedness. That means that all the layers come together, so when you copy the image, you don't copy the image of a layer. When you'd copy an image with multiple layers, your computer copies the top layer. If we did that here, our image would look blurry, and not dreamy like, because it wouldn't be coping or orgininal backround with it. So just merge the layers as shown below.
Once merged, you should only have one layer, your backround layer:
There! Now you're done! Isn't your image totally pwnful and awesome? Well, if it isn't to your liking you can add a border, some brushes, and some finishing touches. If you mess around with it for a while, it can turn out like the image below.
If you want to use this same method of opacity with different effects, it can turn out just the same! If you wanted to use a different kind of blur in place of Gaussian Blur, or Halftone or whatever other effects that you like, you can do them and they'll have a different opacity than how you normally use them This method can be really helpful in other graphic projects, and I hope you've learned from it!