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Art with Paint Shop Pro 5, Part 1: Lens flares
By  Risto-Matti J. Kääriäinen
Introduction
Welcome to the first part of my 'Art with Paint Shop Pro 5' tutorial. I had planned to do the first part about basic lineart colouring, but I got this ready and decided to put it up. It's a step-to-step instruction for making your very own lens flares!
Now, before you start reading this tutorial (and this will apply to all the following articles as well) I suggest you take the Paint Shop Pro manual and read it through. Yes, all of it. And try out all the tools, too. That's because, even though I'll try to explain what I'm doing here, it'll be much easier for you to understand and learn if you're familiar with the tools we're using.
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The actual working size of this picture is 800x800. I have two layers here: a black layer just to help us see what we're doing, and a transparent layer on top. I've coloured the edges of the transparent layer with white. This is necessary because of a strange feature (bug?) of the smudge brush (try doing this without the white border, and you'll see what I mean). I have also put a small white dot in the middle of the picture on the top layer (from now on, assume all operations will be on the top layer)
Now, select the Retoucher tool. Set mode to Smudge, opacity to about 88-96, hardness to 20-60, density 100, size 9-16. Make sure you have the top layer selected (press its button on the layer palette). Now just click once on the white dot. If nothing happened, good.
We are using a nifty feature of PSP5. You can use any drawing tool (including the retoucher) like a line tool. First you click where you want the 'line' to begin, and then shift-click where you want it to end. Easy! Just press down shift and click somewhere on the white border of the top layer.
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Like so. Now add more of these 'lines', varying the opacity and width of the smudge tool. Note that you'll always have to click on the center dot before making a new line. That's because the line starts from the place where you last clicked.
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Next we'll do a few light rings. Add a new layer (right-click on the top layer button in the layer palette, select New, accept the defaults. If you already knew that, good). Then select the Shape tool, set it to circle, outlined, width 2-4, 'antialias' checked. Make a circle.
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Now select Image, Blur, Gaussian blur, radius 3.
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I've added a couple more rings here. They're a bit hard to see since I lowered their layer opacities a little. It's a good idea to put each ring on a separate layer; this way you can easily alter and customize the flare afterwards.
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Now let's add some light effect. Make a new layer on top and Flood fill it with pure white as foreground colour, black as background colour, fill style 'sunbust gradient', orientation 50%, 50%.
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Next we'll get rid of the excess light on the edges. Colors, Adjust Brightness/Contrast, Brightness about -50%.
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Now set the layer blend mode to 'Screen' from the Layer palette. (For an explanation, read the info about the blend modes in PSP from the manual).
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We'll want a bit more light, so just duplicate the light layer and resize it to 50% (Image, Resize, Bilinear resampling, 'resize all layers' unchecked). I've also adjusted the rings' lightness down a little more.
And here we have a finished lens flare!
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Now we'll want to make a picture tube from the flare for ease of use. First disable the black background layer by clicking on the Layer visibility toggle on the Layer palette (you'll find it). If it won't go away, right-click on the layer, select Promote to layer and try again.
Then use the Cropper tool to get rid of the white borders.
Now select File, Export, Picture tube. I'm sure you'll figure out the options.
And there you have your very own lens flare picture tube to use on any picture! The best way to use it is to make a separate layer for the flares and set it to screen. Remember, though, not to overuse them!
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Also, you'll maybe want to spice your lens flares up a bit. There are many ways to do that. Here I've applied some colour with the Retoucher ('Color to target' mode, high size, low opacity), and added a few more rings and dots. It's best to do this kind of special treatment on the finished picture itself, not on the picture tube.
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If you have any questions, please email me! And feel free to leave comments! I will need them when I continue this series of articles. I could especially use comments and suggestions on the layout of the tutorial, because this is the first thing I've ever done in HTML.
FARP Article Guestbook
| Date | Name | Comment | | | 3 Mar 2003 |  Jujube |  Loading...A great tutorial, just one thing, i can't seem to get the circles to outline only, just a big white circle filled in. Other than that, great!!! thanks. | |
| 20 Jun 2003 |  | Loading... It sounds as if those who are complaining on this tutorial have problems with knowing how to use their programms rather than following their tutorial. I found it kind of funny. Cute tutorial though. =) | |
| 15 Sep 2003 | Mk4 | Loading... Two things. SunBurst effect can be sized by limiting the working area with selection. To do the circles correctly uncheck the "Retain Style". Now, go to the color boxes beneath the color palette ,a long left click will open a style bar. select solid for the outline and Null for the inner. now have phun!  . | |
| 15 Feb 2004 | Shadow | Loading... This is a great tutorial -it really helped me a lot! Thanks! ^^  | |
| 19 Sep 2005 |  Cheryl D. Hensley | Loading... I enjoyed your tutorial but there was a problem. I'm not sure if you know this but the words by the pitures are white and can't be read except when you highlight them. I don't know if you did this to it or if someone else did, so just to tell you | |
| 30 Mar 2006 | Anonymous | Loading... I have PSP X I was enjoying your tutorial when I came to a problem. Apparently in this version, you can't draw a circle and have it show up unless you want a full white circle and not just the outline. Just thought I'd let you know. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make my flare.  | |
| 17 Dec 2006 |  Eva Kuklinkova | Loading... OMG I want to hug you right now! I mean, your tutorial helped me a lot, thank you very much. ^_^ | |
| 27 Dec 2006 | Anonymous | Loading... I dont have PSP X only PSP8. But have you tried using an object and turn off the fill in the object properties? THen convert the object to raster? | |
| 18 Mar 2008 | Bungee | Loading... When drawing the circle with PSP7, only anti-alias should be ticked out of the 3 options, and make sure you have no background colour selected. | |
| 15 Feb 2011 |  Tabitha Blackwolf | Loading... I’m blind. . . | |
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