How to make and use selections from Black and white clipart type images.

In this tutorial, I save all my selections to the alpha channel, but only as a matter of preferece, you may prefer to save yours to disk, you can if you wish it's perfectly acceptable.

Materials:
for this tutorial you will need Jasc Paintshop pro
A black and white clipart style image.

If you dont want to make your own selections and just want to make the Frog you will need to either download this file then click here (alpha channel version), or move on to page 3 and use my selections as saved to disk.

Before we start: If the image you are using is a GIF file you will have to increase the colour depth by going Colours/Increase colour depth/16 million colours (24 bit) you don't need to do this if you are using a BMP file.
For both file types: Layers/Promote to layer.

Step 1. Using your magic wand settings as follows
Match mode:RGB Value Tolerance:0 Feather:0, click on the white area surrounding your image to select it, you will see marching ants, selection/invert, now the marching ants will be directly around the outer black lines of your image.

Step 2. Edit/copy Edit/paste as new image, you should now see your image on a transparent background, close original image, no need to save changes.

Step 3. Using magic wand, same settings as above and holding down the shift key at the same time, select all the white areas from within your outlines and hit delete.

Step 4. Using magic wand click on a transparent area within your outline, I like to start at the bottom and work upwards so I try to decide, which looks to be placed the lowest on the canvas and go for that one first, in the case of my image it was the legs.
Selections/modify/expand by.....I used 3 for this image, it will vary from image to image, so you will have to play with this a little, you need to aim for the selection expanding just enough to encompass the outline.

Step 5. Selections/save to alpha channel, you will see New Channel selected, click OK, name your selection, click OK, your selection is now saved to the Alpha chanel.
If you prefer you may take this course instead, Selections/save to disk, click new folder and name it, open it, name your selection and save, if you are using this method any more selections you create for this image must be saved into this same folder with the .sel extension.

Step 6. Repeat steps 4&5 until you have made and saved all your selections. when you have all your selections named and saved, save your image as a psp file, e.g. "pansy.psp" This will remain as a template just in case you missed something and need to go back to it.

If you are saving your selections to the alpha chanel move on to Step 7

Step 7. Shift + D to duplicate the image, Layers new raster layer, floodfill with a colour of your choice. In your layer palette, click on the layer that contains the image outline and delete it, you should now just have the one colour filled layer left, now save as and use a slightly different name to that of your original, I use this image to give to people to work the tut with, it's just a plain colour with all the needed selections embeded so I name mine like this, e.g. "pansy_sels.psp".

Now if you saved your selections to the alpa channel move on to page 2

If you saved your selections to disk move on to page 3

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