materials

Paint Shop Pro 9/Paint Shop Pro 7/Adobe Photo Shop 7

how to do it

To cut out an image you're going to start with an image, for this tutorial I'm going to use this rose.

Open this image in whatever designing program you're going to use.

To do this you're going to select the Freehand Selection tool. There are pictures of the icon in each of the programs this tutorial is for.

Paint Shop Pro 7:
Paint Shop Pro 9: (click and hold down selection tool, select freehand)
Adobe Photoshop 7: (click and hold down free selection tool, select polygon lasso tool)

If you're using Photoshop, you're already a step ahead.

For those using Paint Shop Pro: Now, you're going to need to put the freehand selection tool on 'point-to-point'. To do this, right click on the top menu-bar, go down to palettes and select tool options. (image)
Select 'point-to-point' and set the feather to 2. (image)

Now for the hard part. Make sure your image is on a transparent background. Put your mouse on the outside of the image, and begin to cut around it. It's not much harder than that, but you'll mess up at some point. (image)

tips

If you double click, you end your cutting out session, so watch out.

You can go all the way around in one shot if you want to risk it, but it's recommended you do it by sections

Cut more on the inside of what you're taking out, to get more of the outside out.

Zoom up close on the pixels to get a better view and cut a lot better.