Adding Sparkle

Adding Sparkles with VM Natural Filters

This tutorial was written in PSP9 and Animation Shop and is rated easy to moderate depending on experience

For the purpose of this tutorial I am using a friend's Happy Birthday Tag..... Thanks Karen!....any tag you use should have a white background

Supplies:

VM Natural Filters, click on the zip icon to download

Unzip the filters and place in your plugins folder

Open the birthday tag in psp.

As animated gifs work best on a white background we are going to add one here to the tag

To do this, click on layers/new raster layer

In pop up just click ok

We now need to move this layer to the bottom, underneath the tag

To do this, right click on layer 2 in palette then arrange/send to bottom

Layer 2 should now be under layer 1

Set top colour box to white and floodfill layer 2

Now go to Layers/merge/merge visible

Now using your selection tool

with the following settings

draw round the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY starting from top left of H and ending on bottom right of Y

It should now look like this

To make the sparkle filter work we need to duplicate the tag twice so we have 3 copies

To do this, right click the merged layer in palette and duplicate it

Repeat once more

Your palette should now have 3 layers called merged and copy of merged x 2

Now we will apply the filter

Click on merged layer to make it active then go to effects/plugins/vmnatural/sparkle

And apply the following settings

Now click on copy of merged and repeat filter with the following settings

Click on last copy of merged and apply filter once more with following settings

Now go to selections/select none

Save as a psp file to your desktop. It's important to save as a psp file to retain the layers

Now let's animate!!

Open Animation Shop and click file/browse

Find the file you just saved and select it

Click on the animation button to see the animation in action and to check it's ok

Now go to file/save as and save as a gif

Hope you had fun with this!

Tutorial written by Kim Cross January 2011