Creating Your Own Movie Poster

By JP Kabala

You’ve seen them at the Cineplex. You’ve seen them on the Web. From “A Beautiful Mind” to “Zoolander,” movie posters have become a part of pop culture and their art reflects their times. They range from the classic illustration styles of the 30s and 40s to kitschy ads for 50s and 60s horror flicks with their blood-dripping text and scream queens, to sophisticated photo montages and everything in between.

In this project we’re going to take two photos – a decidedly imperfect photo of a face and an image I snapped of light reflecting on a local waterway – and blend them together artfully, add a little text, and tada! faux poster. This is a fairly easy project, but it will still manage to demonstrate some new Paint Shop Pro 9 features and teach you a couple of rather sophisticated techniques for blending images and using masks along the way. Let’s just jump in and get started.

What you'll need:

• Paint Shop™ Pro® 9
• This tutorial uses sample images faceforposter.pspimage, waterforposter.pspimage, sample gradient stripe.pspgradient and sample brush tip jpk1.pspbrush. JPK1 – One of my own custom brush tips – As you might guess from the name, this is one I use all the time, paint, to create special effects, and, as you’ll see in this exercise, to edit photos
  

  Download sample files (self-extracting .EXE 612 KB)

• Some Windows standard fonts. The ones I used were Verdana, Times New Roman Italic, and Impact. If you don’t have those installed, feel free to substitute anything similar, or get creative with something really off-the-wall. There are dozens, probably hundreds, of free font sites on the web.

When you complete this tutorial you'll be able to:

• Create a movie poster
• Use the Scratch Remover Tool
• Create and use a simple mask
• Use the Push Brush and Paint Brush with a custom tip to create special effects
• One of my favorite easy “How’d she do that?” text tricks

For a project like this one, it’s not essential that the images be absolutely perfect, but there are a couple of obvious flaws in the face image that bother me—that blemish on her chin, and the fine white lines that run across her eye and hairline. Sure, I could have just fixed them before I provided the image, but this gives me a chance to talk about one of my favorite Paint Shop Pro tools and an unheralded little improvement in Version 9.

The Scratch Remover Tool is hidden on the Tools toolbar underneath the Clone Tool, and it doesn’t even have a shortcut letter, but “Scratchy” (as I like to call him) is a pretty handy little guy. In fact, in some cases he works every bit as well as that fancy healing tool that is in some other software. The Scratch Remover isn’t complicated to use at all, but there are a couple of tricks to getting the best results with it.

• Don’t be too literal. The Scratch Remover Tool fixes more than just scratches. It was designed to repair long, narrow flaws (like scratches and fold marks in photos, scans, and faxes) but there are a number of other things it does well, too. Some of you may have heard me call this tool “Digital Clearasil” because it is often an excellent way to banish small facial blemishes like the one on the chin in this image. It also does a good job of removing power lines from skies, taking wrinkles out of clothing, bifocal lines out of glasses and, used cautiously, can even get rid of crows feet and forehead creases and banish stray flyaway hairs.
• Whenever the flaw is small and surrounded by “good” color, simply size the scratch remover to the smallest possible setting that brackets the flaw without touching it, and click and drag out along the flaw. When you release the mouse button, Paint Shop Pro 9 does some fancy math and fills in the space with pixels of an average color that blends in nicely.
• If the flaw crosses areas of high contrast, making several smaller repairs may be better than one large one.
• If you make a mistake, undo and try again.
• Paint Shop Pro 9 special secret enhancement! In earlier versions, you could ONLY use the Scratch Remover on flattened images and background layers. New in Paint Shop Pro 9, you can now use it on any raster layer.

Let’s fix the problems on the face layer now.

• Paint Shop Pro 9 has some shortcuts to masking built in: the Show All and Hide All masks. They are pre-filled with pure white (Show All) or pure black (Hide All)
• Masks are like clothes for your layer or image. Masks can cover up or reveal the image, but they don’t change what is underneath.
• Wherever you paint with black on a mask, it’s like putting on a big heavy overcoat. You are hiding everything that’s beneath it.
• Wherever you paint with white on a mask, it’s like covering the image with clear plastic. You can see everything that’s beneath it.
• When you paint with any shade of gray, the part of the image beneath the gray becomes semitransparent. Light gray makes it nearly transparent. Dark gray nearly solid. And if light gray is like putting on pantyhose or a sheer scarf, darker gray is perhaps more like covering up with a lightweight cotton shirt.
• So, when we added that Show All mask, nothing appeared to change because we’re looking at layer Raster 1 through that clear plastic. But now we want to hide portions of the face layer, so we’re going to take a default regular Paintbrush, place pure black in the foreground swatch, and paint out the portions that we want to hide. Take a look at and you’ll see the portions of the face layer that we need to paint out, and an approximation of what the mask layer would look like if you could actually see it.

Wherever you paint, Raster 1 will appear to become transparent. Work slowly and precisely until you get the profile defined, then you can use larger strokes in the areas of the hair. Were going to bring some if the hair back in a later step.

In the next steps, we’re going to use my own favorite custom brush tip in two different ways. I’ve shared this brush with many students and friends over the past year or so. Those of you who frequent the Jasc forums may know it by another name. I’ve shared it there in the Resources forum. After seeing the effects that two other artists I know were producing with their own special effect brushes, I set out to create one brush that combined the best of both. That’s why JPK1 is such an odd shape. It has a flat side, a curved side, and sharp, medium, and oblique pointed ends. By rotating the brush, you can adapt it to various spaces on your canvas without having to change any other Tool Options or change brushes.

If you haven’t downloaded JPK1 to your Brushes folder, do so now. JPK 1 is a Custom Brush Tip. It can be used in Paint Shop Pro 8 or 9 with any of the raster painting and retouching tools, and with the eraser.

Click the Mask layer to make it your active layer. Press B to activate the regular raster Paint Brush. Using the settings shown (yes, that is the same JPK1 tip we used with the Push brush!) and choosing white as your foreground color, paint over the mask to allow the hair we’ve just created to blend smoothly into the background. If you make a mistake, change the color to black, and paint it out.

This is a technique that can be used to blend any image of a person with soft or flyaway hair (or an animal with fur or feathers) into a new background. The inset of the Layer Palette shown reveals the changes that painting with white with the custom brush have made to the mask. The transition between hair and background can be made to look even more delicate and translucent by passing the soften brush over the outside edges of the hair on the mask layer, but that step probably isn’t necessary here.

OK, we’ve fixed some problems with the face image, we’ve added more hair, and we’ve blended the images together, the only things left to do are: