Dissolve Effect in PaintShop Pro

Dissolve Effect in PaintShop Pro

View the youtube video here: Dissolve Effect

In this tutorial we are going to cover how to create this dissolve effect in PaintShop Pro.

Fix the Composition

Since my starting image is landscape, but I want the particles to fly upward, I need to modify the composition.  Since the background is all white, this is easy, just crop the side a little bit.

Then Image > Add Borders to the top.

Remove Background

Duplicate the first layer, and call this Layer the "Above the Pig".  On this layer, since all the work we are doing will be above the Pig we only need to remove the background on the top.  Since this image has a very eraser-friendly background, we can use the Background Eraser.

\

The Freehand selection tool can be used to select and remove the rest.

Now duplicate this layer and call the top layer "On the Pig".  You should now have three layers.

• On the Pig Layer (dissolving)
• Above the Pig Layer (flying particles)
• Background

We are going to be doing some specific work on each of these layers, so follow the names as the subheadings in the following steps.

Background Layer

For this layer, all we need to do is white out (or erase) the pig body.  This is so that when we start masking out the pig for the disintegration effect, we'll see the background instead of the pig.  If you don't have as easy a background, you'd need to use a more sophisticated technique for erasure such as the clone tool.

Above the Pig Layer

The first thing to do in this layer is to use the Smudge tool to start smearing the top of the pig up into the air.  These are the settings I used:

The most important one is the Step.  You want to make sure it is reduced down to 1 so that you don't get a repeating pattern look on your image.  If you see this happening (image below), your Step is probably not set to 1.

At this stage you should have an image that looks something like this.

While still having the Above the Pig layer selected, add a Mask layer and choose Hide All.  In doing so, all your great work will be invisible (and that's ok).  We'll select the Paintbrush tool, and select the dispersion brush (which you can get at Brusheezy). 

With the color white you can begin to paint the texture onto the Mask (which should be black).  In doing so, you'll begin to see the dispersion particles begin to show.  To get the right sized particles and the appropriate density, you'll want to do a mixture of painting black and white with the same brush.

You'll also need to rotate the brush when painting at different angles to get the dispersion to fade in the desired directions.

Now before moving onto the next layer you'll want to mask out (paint with a normal default round brush) black all over the actually piggy bank.  I did this out of order in the video, but it's necessary before working on the next layer.  So your "Above the Pig" layer should look like this.

On the Pig Layer

Now we've created some particles on the Above the Pig layer, we need to remove some matter from the Pig itself so it looks more like its disintegrating.  So with the "On the Pig" layer selected, lets create a new Mask, but this time Show All.

Now we are going to paint into the Mask with our dispersion brush once again, but now with the color black to start "erasing" elements of the pig bank itself.  At this stage you should have something that resembles this.

Take your Time

Now that we have all our layers in place, and we have our masks and dispersion particles painted, we need to clean it up and make the fade better.  This takes time (patience), and an iron-will to not settle for a sub-par looking image.  Focus on the blend between the On the Pig and Above the Pig layers.  Also, use a default shape brush for hard edge cleanup around the ears or the lower parts of the pig body.

It can be tedious, but the extra bit of work is what helps make the effect convincing. 

Contrast for Effect

The final step, specific to this image is to decrease the brightness a little bit just to bring out the color of the pig and particles from the super-bright white background.  To achieve this, I used the Adjust > Brightness Contrast > Levels tool.  The primary change was to move the middle slider from 128 to 165, effectively darkening the mid-tones.

In the end you should have something like this.  In this example the particles are pretty small, and I attribute that to the dispersion brush I used.  You can get larger particles with a different kind of brush, or there are other techniques such as using brush variance.