Blended Background Tutorial

The fade into background is a technique created by Lenora. The blended background and combining fade into blended background are techniques created by me.

You will need one of Paint Shop Pro versions 5, 6, and 7, Texturizer plug-in (you can download it here), Textures (you can download those here), the fade background mask which you can download Fadebgmsk and Fadebgmsk2 then place in your mask folder, FM Tile Tools (Psp Plug-in) get it here.

1. Choose a graphic you would like to use.
I choose a Kinkade piece called Spring Gate. Original
dimensions are (640x480).

2. Click image/resize with following settings:

The new dimensions are (400x300).

(400x300)

3. Next take the original resized image (400 x 300) and duplicate it (shift D) twice, you can now close the original.

4. Take the first duplicate and make it active and click Image/Blur/Gaussian Blur set Radius 15 as below:

Your image should look like this:

(400x300)

6. Set the blurred image aside for now.

7. Make the second duplicate (nonblurred) image active.

8. Now click Images/Plug-ins/Fm Tile Tools/Seamless Tile:
With these settings on the nonblurred image:

9. Click Mask/Load from disk browse and find fadebgmsk in your mask folder. Then click open. (if you don't have this file you can download the file fadebgmsk or fadebgmsk2.)
Should look like this:

10. Make your blurred duplicated image active again.
Click Image/resize with these settings ( I make the height 5 pixels smaller than the original height so the faded image sits properly on the blended background).

11. Your image should look like this:

(Image is reduced to display here)
True dimensions are (1024x295)

12. Now click on Images/plug-ins/FM Tile Tools/seamless tile:
It should look like this.

13. Your graphic should look like this:

14. Using the blurred image. Click Image/plug-ins/Texturizer with these settings:

Load in the texture footprts or a texture of your choice. If you don't have the texturizer you can download it here. If you don't have the texture footprts, it and frsdgls are zipped and you can download them here. Click okay.

15. Your image should look like this:

16. Make your masked image active. Click Edit/Copy.

17. Make your now textured image active.
Click Edit/Paste/As new layer. Use the mover tool:
to move the pasted image to the left and align it so that there is no background show top, left side, or the bottom. Your image should look like this: