This is Lesson #9 named "Making a Tube". There are many different ways to make a tube. There is no correct or wrong way to make a tube as long as you end up with a graphic or piece of one on a transparent background. This is how to make a simple tube from a graphic with a solid background. We will be covering other ways to tube in later lessons.

Save the copy of the Donald Duck Picture below. I chose this as our working copy because of the strong outlines which make it easier to create a tube.

and then we are going to make it slightly larger than the Donald Image. The Donald Image is 297 Wx291 H so my new image is going to be 300x300, we are making sure that this image will be the at 16 million colors see the color depth box or 8 bit/channel in newer versions. One more important thing is to make sure the Transparent box is clicked. see below:

Now we are going to copy the Donald picture and paste it into our new image. Make sure that you have the Donald picture selected then Go to Edit/Copy. Next Select the New Image (click on it) and Paste Donald into that box (Edit/Paste as New Layer). We need to promote it to it's own layer so that we can check it with different color backgrounds. It should be slightly smaller

than the new image, move it until it is centered in this box. It should look like the one below:

Now with your "Magic Wand Tool"

make sure you settings have the tolerance raised up to at least 25 even more would be better, and the anti-alias button is checked. click in the background area of the image, the white area around Donald, you should have just Donald outlined with the "marching ants". Tap your delete button and the background should be erased.

You now have a tube, pretty easy? yes! A tube after all is an image or part of a image with a transparent background. Nothing mysterious about it! You now want to check your image by highlighting our background layer and flood filling with a dark color, and again with a lighter color. You may need to use the magic wand tool and repair any areas around the tube by clicking on those areas with the tool and erase the areas individually.

You can see in my image that there is a faint outline around the outside edge? This is caused from removing the background from a light color and showing it onto a dark color. If you know you will be using this tube on a dark background it is best to start out by flood filling the image with a dark color prior to using the magic wand tool. All of this will be discussed in further lessons. But for now Delete your background layer and you will have your tube and we can now save it.

You now have a tube that you can use again and again. Donald will now appear in your drop down menu for tubes.

We used a very simple image for this lesson, choose your images carefully in the beginning because if the outline of the tube is less defined you may run into problems creating a clear tube and end up with a lot of jagged edges (jaggies). This is called a single tube, one image. We will be discussing multiple tubes in our next lesson.