Making Snow Globes

You'll notice that the tail is hanging out of the globe a bit, so let's move it in to place  :o)

Select your mover tool again

Depending how accurate you are with your mouse and how much of the tail is hanging out, you may need to zoom in on your image (View, Zoom In By 1)

Click and drag the bit of tail that is outside the globe and move the whole dolphin into the middle of the globe

Now use your cropper tool and get rid of most of the extra background (leave some around the outside though)

Now merge all your layers (layers, merge, merge visible)

Nearly finished!  Save your work again now... is it still a .psp file?

Now select your magic wand tool

Go to your Tool Options pallette and make sure you have the following settings:

Match mode:  RGB Value
Tolerence:  25
Feather:  0
Sample merged:  UNticked

Now click somewhere around the outside of your globe and you'll get marching ants all around the outside outline of your globe:

**Have a play around with the tollerence setting if the marching ants take off too much or too little from around the outside of your snowglobe... they should be as close as possible to the edge of it without taking off too much of the outline

Now just hit "delete" on your keyboard and you'll end up with something like this:

DO NOT deselect

Select your floodfill tool

Choose a different colour and floodfill the bit inside the marching ants.  Choose a colour that *is not* anywhere in the snowglobe otherwise it'll look really weird when we make the background transparent.  I've chosen a purply bluey kinda colour

Deselect (Ctrl + D)

Now go to "Colours" and down to "Set Palette Transparency"

A mini dialogue box will come up... choose these settings:

Palette:  Optimized Median Cut
Reduction Method:  Nearest Colour

Now hit "OK"

Another dialogue box will come up... click your mouse somewhere on the background of your globe - the colour should automatically appear in the bottom box and the bottom radio button should automatically be selected

Hit "OK"

Now, either PSP is automatically showing you the transparent background (grey/blue and white check boxes) or it's decided to be lazy and you need to do a little something extra to get it to show you the transparent background.  If you can see the transparent background checked square things, just skip this next step  :o)

Go back up to the "Colours" menu then down to "View Palette Transparency"

It'll now be showing you the checked square thingies I was talking about :o)

Crop off any extra background

Save your work as a .gif file (and a .psp file if you want to keep it and change it at a later date) and you're all finished!

If you want to add animation to it, now's the time to do it  :o)