Radiant Day Lilies

(For Sharon and Paul - Happy Easter)

Materials Needed:
Paint Shop Pro
Xero Plugin Set 4 - Radiance  You can review the plugin here.
Floral jpg of choice.  You can use my photo by right clicking the image below.  Select save to disk.
Font of choice:  I used Castellar Font which is included in most Microsoft Office and Publisher packages.

This tut is written for the advanced beginner to intermediate user. A novice should be able to find and work with the tools I list if you follow each step closely.

I started with a mundane photo of the daylilies at the corner of the house.
I see a lot of possibilities for this photo, but it looks like a lot of work to clean it up enough to be useful for much of anything.  Xero Plugins to the rescue - Lets get started!

Make sure your Layer Palette is open.  Press F8 to open it.

Open your graphic, press Shift + D to duplicate it and close the original. Right click on the word Background in your layer palette and promote the background layer to a raster layer. (Promote Background Layer.)

Effects > Plugins > Xero > Radiance
Strangeness: 85
Charm: 124
Truth: 176
Beauty: 255

Interesting effect, but that rose is out of place.

Use the lasso tool to make a wide selection around the rose.  See the example below.
Selection type:  Point to point
Mode: Replace or Add
Feather and Smoothing: 0
Anti-alias: Checked

Selections > Modify > Feather > 9

Right click on the Raster Layer in your layer palette.  Promote Selection to Layer.

Use the eyedropper tool and left click close to the edge of the green glow around the flowers to set the foreground color (it's not true black).  Mine came up #010302.

Floodfill the promoted selection to hide the rose.  You may need to repeat the flood fill a couple of times to cover the rose.  Merge the visible layers.

Use the dropper tool to select two colors from the daylilies for your foreground and background colors. Left click to set the foreground color and right click to select the background color.

Font:  I used these settings.  You can use any font you want to type whatever you want for your text.

Position your text while it's in Vector mode.  Hover your mouse over the center of your text until it turns into a +with > arrows on all 4 points.  Click and drag your text to where you want it.  You can also adjust the size by grabbing a node and stretching or shrinking the text.



Right click on the Vector1 layer in the layer palette. Convert to raster layer.

Layers > Merge > Merge All (Flatten)

Image > Add Border - 3 - Symetric checked.  Use your foreground color.  Find the foreground color by right clicking on the color box and selecting the top box at the bottom of the flyout window.

Image > Add border - 1 - black - right click on the color box and select black.
Image > Add border - 3 - background color. (The color nestled below/behind the foreground color.)

Selections > Select All
Selections > Modify > Contract > 8
Selections > Invert

Effects > Texture Effects > Blinds
Color #4c7a2f

Repeat Blinds, but uncheck Horizontal.

Effects > 3D effects > Inner Bevel with these settings


Select > None

Export your file as a .jpg with a compression level no higher than 8.

I hope you enjoyed doing this Easter tut as much as I enjoyed writing it.

vetch