Paint Shop Pro has a Picture Tube brush (in versions 5.0 and up) that allows you to “spray” a bitmap with pictures of plants. Paint Shop Pro uses “tube files” to store the bitmaps you paint with. PlantStudio can help you create Paint Shop Pro picture tubes from your plants.

The process of making Paint Shop Pro picture tubes from PlantStudio plants is not completely automated and requires some knowledge of Paint Shop Pro. Also, we may not have all these instructions correct for your version of Paint Shop Pro. If any of our instructions don’t make sense in Paint Shop Pro, check your Paint Shop Pro documentation for help.

Step 1: Make the picture tube bitmap file in PlantStudio

▪        Select the plants you want to include in your picture tube in the PlantStudio main window.

▪        Choose Export >Nozzle/Tube Bitmap from the File menu. The Save Nozzle/Tube Bitmap window will appear.

▪        First choose which plants you want to use in the tube – the ones you already selected, or all visible plants, or all the plants in the open plant file. 

▪        Choose 24-bit color depth, because Paint Shop Pro requires it for picture tubes.

▪        Choose a resolution. Pay attention to the file size reported at the bottom of the window.

▪        Choose a background color to draw behind the plants. Normally you will want to leave this color as black, because you need a color you don’t find in any of your plants. If you have any black parts in your plants you can change this to a color you don’t have, like white.

▪        At the bottom of the window you can see the number of items and the tube cell size. You need to remember the number of items, but Paint Shop Pro calculates the cell size itself.

▪        Click Save, then choose a directory to place the bitmap file in. The file will be called “nozzle” something, but this doesn’t mean you can’t use the file in Paint Shop Pro – it just means Painter had its nozzles before Paint Shop Pro had its picture tubes. You can change the file name if you like because Paint Shop Pro doesn’t need all that information (Painter does).

Step 2: Select the plants in Paint Shop Pro and clear the background

▪        Start Paint Shop Pro and open the bitmap file you just saved. 

▪        Click the Magic Wand button on the toolbar.

▪        Click anywhere there isn’t a plant. You should see the entire non-plant area of the bitmap selected. See the tips below and Paint Shop Pro’s help system if you are having trouble getting a clean selection.

▪        Choose Invert from the Selections menu. Now only the plants should be selected.

▪        Choose Promote to Layer from the Selections menu to make the selection into a layer. (If you did not save the file in 24-bit color, this menu item will be unavailable. Choose Increase color depth – 16 million colors (24 bit) from the Colors menu.) 

▪        Now open the layers palette if it is not open (choose Toolbars from the View menu, then check Layer Palette in the list).

▪        In the layers palette, click on Background.

▪        Choose Delete from the Layers menu. The background color will disappear and you should see the plants against a transparent (checkerboard) background. This is your picture tube.

Step 3: Save the picture tube

▪        Now choose Export > Nozzle/Tube Bitmap from the File menu. In the window that appears, enter the number of plants in the Cells Across edit box. If you forgot how many plants there were, just count the plants in the picture you see. If you enter the wrong number of plants you might get a tube with fragments of plants. But don’t worry – Paint Shop Pro lets you change this information later.

▪        Enter a name for your new tube and click OK.

▪        You can close the tube file now.

Step 4: Use the tube

▪        Create a new image with nothing in it. 

▪        Choose the Picture Tube button on the toolbar. 

▪        Bring up the controls palette (choose Toolbars from the View menu, then check Control Palette in the list).

▪        In the controls palette, choose your tube from the drop-down list.

▪        Start drawing with the tube in your picture.

▪        If the plants are fragmented, click Options on the controls palette and change the number labeled Cells Across to the correct number of plants.

Tips on making and using picture tubes

▪        You can change how large or small the plants come out in Paint Shop Pro by changing the Scale slider on the controls palette. 

▪        If your plants are fairly large (say 100x100 pixels), laying down the plant pictures with mouse movement may be sluggish in Paint Shop Pro. If you want your plants to appear large, it’s best to click for each plant instead of dragging. Reducing the scale also solves this problem.

▪        If your plants come out with pieces of the background color between some leaves, you might have to merge together two or more magic wand areas when you do the initial selection for the tube. To do this, check the Sample Merged checkbox on the controls palette while you are using the magic wand, then Shift-click on the different internal areas you want to include in your selection. When you have included all the background color areas you can find, then invert the selection and proceed as usual. If this is really messy, you can avoid the problem by going back to PlantStudio and rotating the plants in question until you don’t see as many isolated areas of background color. 

▪        To get rid of a tube, you need to remove the lines that describe the tube file from the text file Tubes.ctl in the Tubes directory under Paint Shop Pro 5. See your Paint Shop Pro help system for help with this.

▪        If you distribute a picture tube over the internet, it’s a good idea to include a text file that has the lines that must be inserted in the Tubes.ctl file (with an explanation of how to do it) so anyone who downloads your tube can use it easily.

Created with the Personal Edition of HelpNDoc: Full-featured EPub generator