Hopefully everyone who uses Paint Shop Pro has seen and used "Picture tubes". They are a great way to place Foreground and Background images into your Renderings. With a few tools we can add Shadows to your tubes and then use them in SP renderings.

Open a new image with a Transparent background that is 800x600





Within the new image place a picture Tube. The one I am using is of a tree. You can find it in the Boneyard. Download it and place it in the Tubes folder.

Take the Eraser tool and erase the bottom of the tree just to clean it up.

Go to Effects >3d Effects>Drop shadow and place a check mark in the Shadow on new layer box. This will promote the drop shadow to a layer of it's own.





Make the Shadow layer active and then use the Deformation tool (It is the second tool down in the tools menu)

If you place the cursor near the center of the deformation box it will turn into a rotation tool. Rotate the shadow image to the right.

You can also use the "grips" above below and to the side to deform the image. stretch it's length and shrink it's width.





Now merge the layers you have created but don't use merge flatten. You want to merge visible. You will have to do this a couple of times until you are left with a single layer with Transparency. This is required to create the new Tube.

We will now export this as a Tube Go to File >Export Picture>Tube





Enter a name for your new tube.

To test it out open a rendering and place the newly created tube.

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