Photo Effect PSP X3

[mjhannan]

I'm not sure what the effect that I'm looking to produce is called much less if X3 can produce it. Basically what I want is to take the image of a pattern, for example a checker board, and blend it with a photo so that either the black squares of the checker board stay as they are and the white ones show portions of the photo as if they were transparent.

Thanks for any help.

[Kathy_9]

Hopefully you are comfortable working with layers. If so, you can achieve that by adding your black and white checkered image as a layer on top of your other image and then used the blend mode on the layers palette. Overlay should do it for you but you can try the other blend modes to get the effect you are looking for.

[LeviFiction]

EDIT: Once again Kathy beats me to it. But I think they'll want either Multiply or Screen. Overlay is sort of a mixture between the two and affects all colors except for neutral gray.
Screen = 255-[((255-a)*(255-b))/255] (black disappears)
Multiply = (a * b) /255 (white disappears)

Then again I could be misinterpreting what they are asking.

Original reply:
Layers.

Place the checkerboard pattern on its own layer above the image.

From there you can do any number of things. Change the blend mode of the layer to "Multiply" if the white areas are pure white they will vanish leaving only the black squares and the image that was behind it.

Change the blend mode of the layer to "Screen" and if the areas of the image that are black are really black they'll disappear leaving only the white squares and the image that was behind the black squares.

If your checkerboard pattern isn't completely white or black the blend modes will skew the colors slightly. From there you can try the magic wand tool to select either the black and white squares using the "Tolerance" setting to grab the variations in color and then delete that selection from the checkerboard layer.

You can also base a mask off of the image luminance and then invert the mask so that the dark areas become white and the white areas become black and use that to make away the checkerboard layer.

Lots of options, take your pick.

[mjhannan]

Excellent!! That is exactly what I was looking for. Multiply did the trick. Thank you both!!!