Paint Shop Pro v7 » Cut out a tail/mane
To cut a tail or a main out is pretty hard. There is a lot of hair to handle, and it’s quite annoying. So to make it look good, you have to practice a bit.
Ok, this is the hairy horse I’ll use:
Use the eraser brush to cut the tale out so it looks quite good. Use the left mouse button when you follow around, and the right one to correct. So you get nice edges. I have set my brush size to 15 and hardness to 55. Step is 25 as always. My pic now looks like this:
Then enlarge the eraser brush to size 55 and set the hardness to 0. You can also reduce the opacity to 30-50. The pic now looks like this:
If it looks edgy you can use the smudge tool to soften it a bit. Click on the hand on the left tool bar menu in psp. Go to the middle fane in the tool box (if you don’t see it press the letter o on your key board) and choose Smudge in the drop down menu. Then choose the left fane, and set the size to around 33, the hardness to 63 for example, and step to 1. Opacity should be 100. Now, click and drag around the horse tail, and you can see it gets blurred out. My result:
You can use the same technique on manes and fluffy fur. The more fur, the softer and bigger eraser brush I use…
You can also use the smudge tool to pull some hairs out. Check the smudging tutorial for more help.