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PAGE 2 Now we want to add the color to our tree. For this tutorial I will be making the garland and the bulbs the same color. You may choose to make them different colors if you wish. Make your Garland layer active. Click on your Magic Wand tool and select all. Click on any portion of your garland. You will now have just the garland areas selected and the "marching ants" should be surrounding these areas. Now add the filter of your choice. I used a BladePro preset from Lady Sara: (LSglow8.q9q). Lady Sara has either moved her site or taken it down and I have not been able to contact her. Lady Sara had given me permission to offer the download from my site, so you can download her preset here.
Repeat this step on your Bulb layer:
Make sure all three layers are visible. Right click on any of your layers and choose Merge Visible. You should now have two Christmas Trees, one plain and one decorated. Now we need to make them transparent. You will need to take the following steps on both images. I have tried the GIF Optimizer in PSP, but I couldn't get a "clean" transparency, therefore, I use the method which works best for me. This is the method I will use in this tutorial. You may use another method if you are comfortable with it. Add a new layer and move it to the bottom. Flood fill this layer with white. Now merge all layers. Go to Colors/Set Palette Transparency. You should get two boxes. These are the settings I used:
Now, if you go to Colors/View Palette Transparency, you can see that your image is transparent. If not, click undo and try it again with a contrasting color. Once you are happy with you transparency, save your images as GIF files. (I saved mine as tree1.gif and tree2.gif) Now on to the animation...
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