Using Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo Tubes to add interest to royalty free images that come with photo editing software.

Use Corel Paint Shop Pro or other photo editing software to play with stock photos and make them even more interesting. Get to know your photo editing software.

Open up one of those stock "sample" photos or even your free royalty free photo image discs (they usually come with the application). Then play and play and play with your software and learn how each tool works.You can't mess this up and you don't have to save the changes.

You can have hours and hours of fun with the hundreds of special effects in your photo editing software. All of the major brands of image editing software come with tons of bells and whistles of things you can do to enhance, change, distort, filter or just radically alter any photo you can open in the software. All it takes is practice and zero fear to accomplish some very impressive adjustments to your photos.

Don't be afraid of going wild on a photo. You don't have to save it and you can use the "undo" command immediately if you don't like the look of a change you just made. The undo command is found on the toolbar of the software, usually next to the "file" "print" etc. buttons at the top of the window. It looks like a curved arrow pointing to the left in most applications. As soon as you make a change to a photo, the "undo" arrow will light up. This means that the undo function is now active and you can undo the change. If you make several changes and then decide you don't like any of those changes and you want to start over, just keep clicking the "undo" arrow/button until you have gone back as far as you want to.

After you have made acceptable changes that you really do want to save, then use the save function to save your work. Better yet is to use the "save as" function which will also save your intact original. You have to give the "save as" photo a new name different than the original.

Here are 3 simple examples of using the built in Photo Tubes (a tool that adds whole drawings to another photo). The Photo Tube tool is found in Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo and probably exists in other image editing software by a different name.

That's the deal with photo and image editing software, they tend to have different names for the same effects and buttons and tools that are used. You just have to Read the Fine Manual that comes with your software to figure out what each tool does!

I was looking through my photo library discs that came with some software package I bought. I don't remember whether it was Paint Shop or Print Shop, but it did promise that the images were royalty free for my use.

I found this wonderful photo of a bobcat. I had already played with my photo tubes and I knew that one of the tubes painted realistic flowers onto any photo. I tried it out and finally came up with this simple, yet spectacular, image of a bobcat in a garden!

I don't know how many times I clicked the undo key - adding and removing flowers until I found just the right look. The photo tubes paint in anything from 3D blobs to Zoo animals. But I wanted some bright flowers for this bobcat to smell! I could just as easily have added an airplane and have the bobcat appear to look 100 feet tall!

I found this old photo in my mother's scrapbook album. This was a friend of my mom's from Pearl Harbor Hawaii. The photo was about the same age as the letters my mom had from a friend that had been stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. So the photo is at least from the 1940's.

The photo had some creases and tears and was fading fast. Both of these things are fairly easy to fix in a photo editing application (read your manual!). But I thought the image was just too plain.

The girl already had a Pikaki or Hibiscus flower in her hair, but it was hard to see, so I used the Photo Tube tool to add a new one. Then I used the text tool to add a friendly little message. I wish the photo had been autographed or signed and dated on the back. So remember to do this with all your printed photos!

I could have added some other colors or even enhanced the black and white by "colorizing" it, but I thought that would make it look fake-ish. Always keep things simple. The frame was digitally added also by using the frame tool in Paint Shop Pro.

Just to show you how wild and crazy you can get with photo editing software and photo tubes, I made this cute little photo.

First I took a generic photo of fire on a black background, then chose the photo tube tool and by adding and undoing stuff a couple dozen times, I ended up with this lovely puppy looking at ice cream with his tongue hanging out.

Apparently, the devil is making him dream of dessert!

Dear readers,

Please feel free to give the author some honest feedback on this hub. I plan to assemble my hubs into a book someday. You can help.

Please help your fellow hubbers by leaving comments, voting up or down and choosing an opinion of the hub, eg. Useful, Funny, Awesome, Beautiful, Interesting.

Share this hub with your social media and friends by choosing the "share" button.

Thank you,

Lela