I'm working with PSP9, so my comments always correspond to PSP9.
But they shouldn't be sooo different from PSP8.

   

Where should I store all my masks?

Now, I never add a mask to the "mask"-section within PSP. First, it slows down the program storing everything within PSP, second I can't see the proportions of the mask anymore if I put them into this folder.

I store them on a different place somewhere on my harddrive with subdivisions for the different masks categories. Whenever I need one, I open up the folder where all my masks located, pick the one I want and open it in PSP. Now I can have a look at the size of the mask (go to "resize"). If necessary I resize my image now. Next I go to "Layer - New Mask Layer - from Image" (I pick the name of the mask I just opened - invert or not invert - depends on what I want) and I'm done.

   

Why does the mask overlap my image?

First make sure your image has aproximately the same size as the mask. That's important, if you don't want the mask disorting your image.

If you can do this by assimilate the width, but not the hight (or conversely), why not adding a colored background behind the image, using either a color that fits your image or a contrast color/gradient? Then merge this 2 layers together and afterwards add the mask.

To get an idea what I mean, I prepared some pics for you:

Here's your mask, dimensions 377x377


and here is your image, dimensions 362x500

As you see, they really don't fit together.

If you would use the mask on the image like it is it would look like this:
Ooops, where is the head? See what I mean?

Therefore I resized my image to a width of 377 (it's not so far from 362, so that the image still looks good - I didn't changed the hight). Then I changed the CANVAS-size of the image to 377 width and 450 hight. Now I have a transparent border around my image.
To get a gradient what fits your image, pick a light color from your image as foreground and a darker color as background. Then change your materials to "gradient". Assemble the gradient the way you want it, add a new raster layer to your image, arrange it to the bottom and floodfill with your gradient.

Now it looks like this:


To get rid of the hard contours of the image itself, I added a fading-mask to the image
(do this one, two or three times till you get the effect you want):


And now we have this:


Now go and "merge all", then add the mask and you come up with this:


Isn't this much better?!

Play with the proportions of the canvas size, to make the masked image looks the way you want it.




more to come!



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