I claim the copyright to this tutorial.  You are free to do whatever you please with what you make, but please do not take my tutorial.  Do not send the tutorial through email.  Only share my link.

This tutorial was created for some friends of mine who wanted to begin learning more about PSP.  It is intended for intermediates to learn how to use preset shapes and to shade.  If you have any questions, please feel free to Email me.

To do this tutorial you will also need Paint Shop Pro.  I wrote this with  Paint Shop Pro 9, but the steps may also be done in any version.  You may download a free trial at Jasc.

Remember to save as a psp file often!

Sig tags with shadows like the one below are often saved on a white background, so that the shadow will show properly.  If it were saved with transparent background, the saving as a gif would cause the shadow to become an opaque black.  That's why you get the "ugly" black edge around some of your gifs.  It's because of a shadow on a transparent background.  GIFs cannot have partial transparency--either it is completely transparent in that spot, or completely opaque.

The procedure below is one way of removing white backgrounds, and may not always produce a clean edge.  It would work when the background is all basically one color.  Now it is good for you to remember that even though it looks like the background is all white, it is really different shades of white.  Since there is also a lot of white in the image, we will have to be careful when we select the white. 

1.  Open the sig tag in PSP.

2.  In the top menu, click Layers > Promote Background Layer.   Jpegs have backgrounds.  And we cannot make anything transparent, until the background is converted to a layer.  You would have to do this with gifs that you open in PSP, too.  All gifs are transparent because the background color was chosen to be transparent.  However, when you open it up in PSP, the background color will show.

3.  Choose the magic wand tool.  Set the tolerance to zero (0), and left-click on the white background.  You will see that the marching ants do not closely fit the sig tag.  This is because of the color blending that occurs during saving.  Right-click on the white space with the magic wand to remove the ants.

4.  So we will need to change the tolerance.  I changed the tolerance to 10.  This setting made the marching ants fit better around the name, BUT you can see that it selected some of the white in the flower (circled).  We don't want to remove part of our sig tag.  Right-click to remove the ants.

5.  So you will need to lower the tolerance some, and may need to play with the number until you find the right one.  Here, you can see that tolerance = 5.  Works really well.  If you look closely in the picture above, you will notice that the marching ants only surround the tag, but there is some white space inside the letter D and the letter O.  Hold the shift button down and click inside the letter D and the letter O to ALSO select those regions.  See picture below.  Make sure you have selected all the white that you want to delete.

6.  Now press the delete key on the keyboard, and you have deleted the white background.

7.  Now you will need to save this as a GIF.  In top menu, click File > Export > GIF Optimizer.

8.  In the first default tab (Transparency), click the mark next to Existing image or layer transparency.

9.  Then click on the Partial Transparency Tab.  Click next to "Use full transparency to pixels below..."  Set that to 10 to 25%.  Sometimes you have to play with this number.  Just watch the right screen to see how changing the number affects your image.  At the bottom, click next to "No, use the existing image color at 100% opacity"

10.  Now click on the Colors Tab.  Set the colors to 256, dithering to 25%.  Again, you might have to adjust the dithering number.  At the bottom, select Optimized Median Cut.  I find these settings are usually the best ones.

11.  Click Ok, and a save box will come up.  Give your graphic a name and click save.

 Please do not remove this tutorial from my site.  Share my url.