How can I replicate these images

[CraigV]

Years ago (10+) a friend took a basic shot of my face and did the following. I have the basics down about selecting an area and creating a mask layer, but how did he get the coloring, contours and highlights to match? And what abouth the sun glasses - separate mask? He said it took him all of 10 minutes in whatever version of photoshop was around at the time. I have PSP x7 Ultimate.

[Rick_R]

I'm by no means an expert, but my suggestion is to spend some money on a good tutorial book and really read through it. I recommend Learning Corel PaintShop Pro X[whatever] by Diane Koers. There are a number of other books that are also good. You're basically looking at having to buy something in the $25-40 range.

Although there are a lot of tutorials on YouTube and now on Corel's learning center and Corel has massively improved the user manual, unfortunately these techniques are really mainly learned by experimenting. The main thing is not to experiment blindly but get a book with downloadable examples so you can work through the steps yourself.

Also, books and tutorials on using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements are useful. Functionally, PE and PSP tend to copy each other. So an example in PE can often be performed in PSP just by finding the equivalent tool.

[Joelle]

Years ago (10+) a friend took a basic shot of my face and did the following. I have the basics down about selecting an area and creating a mask layer, but how did he get the coloring, contours and highlights to match? And what abouth the sun glasses - separate mask? He said it took him all of 10 minutes in whatever version of photoshop was around at the time. I have PSP x7 Ultimate.

I think your friend was bragging or his watch had stopped

As already suggested, a good book, PSP tutorials on YouTube will be helpful.

The second image is just adding the selected image to an image of fireworks.
You will have to copy and paste as a layer can't be dragged in X7 (I hope Corel will fix this soon).

Joëlle