From Rags to Riches By Mel In this tutorial we will be learning how to use Muras Meister to copy a tube into a circle and adding sparkles to the finished tag. This is a more advanced tutorial using psp 9. Materials required Focal tube of your choice-Here A single flower tube Accent tubes of your choice Filters unlimited 2.0 Muras Meister copies filter-Here Patterns and background Sparkle or flare to match your tag colors Open a new image with transparent background 600x600 - you can resize later. Rename this layer background. Open your flower tube and resize to approximately 90 x 84 pixels, adjust/sharpness/sharpen once. Copy and paste as new layer to your background image. Effects/Plugins/Mura's Meister copies with the following settings: Activate your magic wand and click inside center of your circle of flowers so you have marching ants..Depending on your tube this may include some areas around your flowers as mine did. (You may also have to expand this area slightly by going to selections/modify/expand by 1. I did not do that for this lesson.) Layer/New layer and flood fill with a color slightly darker than your flower. Effects/texture/blinds or whatever texture matches your overall theme. The following are my settings: Selections/select none Add drop shadow of your choice to this background. Here are my settings: vertical and horizontal 2 opacity 51 blur 5 and color black Copy and Paste as new layer your tubes of choice and position to your liking adding appropriate drop shadows as you go. Go back to your layers palette making sure you are on your background layer and flood fill with a color or pattern to match your main tubes and flower. Effects/plugins/filter unlimited2.0/edges round/round edge1 or your choice. Add whatever text, font and color you would like remembering to add drop shadow and inner bevel to complete your effect. I used font: fairyscroll display, stroke width 2 foreground color dark and background color light to match my tag. I added dropshadow to text of horizontal and vertical 2, opacity 54, blur 3, shadow color black. Add your watermark before we take our project over to animation shop. Merge/merge visible We will now add our sparkles to the image and take it over to AS Duplicate your merged image twice so you have 3 layers. Close off the top two layers, making sure you are working on the bottom open layer only. Now I have my sparkles in my psp tubes so I click on my picture tube tool and find my blue sparkle and set to scale 100. You may have to adjust your size to your preference remembering the other 2 layers will be smaller sizes. Place your sparkles randomly throughout your tag to your personal liking. I did mine only on the upper right side of my tag. Close off this bottom layer and open your middle layer, set sparkle scale to 90 and again randomly place your sparkles on your tag. Close off middle layer and open top layer, sparkle set to scale of 80 and randomly place on tag. These are just a guideline as you may have to adjust yours for your preference. Going back to the bottom layer on your layer palette, copy and paste it into your Animation Shop. Repeat with the next two layer..copying and pasting after current layer until you have them all in Animation shop. I set my display time at 10 for all layers. Save your tag where you know where it is and you are all done! I hope you have enjoyed my tutorial using Mura's Meister Filter! Copyright 2009 Melynda Written for the Le Cafe D'Amis Group. All Rights Reserved.