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  Building
  Making a masked picture with Paint.net
 
A masked picture is a picture which has been cut out of an image and all the surrounded parts have been made totally or partially transparant.
 

We are using the freeware texturing program Paint.net for this tutorial. Goto the website http://www.getpaint.net/index.html where you can download this program. But you can also go to the website : http://www.dotpdn.com/downloads/pdn.html , then you don't have to install the easydocmerge extension, but only the Paint.net program.

 
Once installed, you start the program Paint.Net
File > Open ....and browse for the image you want to cut out as a mask.
In this example it will be this clematis flower.

We will first make the image smaller, so that is covers the flower only.

Now you select the rectangle icon in the toolbar , or you can do it like this :
Go to the second menu bar line and select : Tool > Rectangle Select . And now you draw with your mouse a rectangle around the flower , with just the picture size which you want to maintain.
 
Go to the menu and choose : Image > Crop to selection.

And we continue working with this smaller image.

Now go to the second menu bar line and select : Tool > Magic Wand
And on this second menu bar line you will find also : Tolerance
You can increase or decrease the tolerance: with 2 percent Tolerance, almost nothing will be selected, with 95 percent Tolerance, almost everything will be selected. The tolerance factor will select the same shades of grey in the image and will group them together.
We click in this Tolerance bar en change this to ± 30 percent.
 

Now we start clicking in the green leaves of the image..

You will see that the green leaves that you have selected are surrounded by white lines.
This is the area that the Magic Wand Tool has selected with a tolerance of 30 percent.
Now we delete the selected green leaves, by pressing the delete key.

 

You will now a grey-white pattern , which indicates that this area has become transparant.

Now we continue clicking around the flower with the Magic Wand Tool, and delete each time what has been selected, but don't delete anything from the flower.
Otherwise choose : Edit > Undo.
 
If you want to work more accurately, then choose : View > Zoom In.
Or you can type also a zoom percentage.
 

After a short while, you will come to an image where most of the green around the flower has been removed.

But there still remain a lot of small parts, which are also difficult to select with the Magic Wand Tool. And it will require a lot of time to erase them one by one.
That's why we will use another tool to remove the rest :
Now go to the second menu bar line and select : Tool > Eraser
And on this second menu bar line you will find also : Brush Width
At the moment this with is only 2 , we change this to 30.
Now we start to move our mouse over the image and we see a large circle. By pressing the left mouse button, the small remaining green parts can be quickly removed.
 
For removal of more accurate parts in the neighbourhoud of the flower, you can zoom in, and change the brush with again to 2 . Don't leave any small parts of green around the flower, because every little part will still be seen on the masked image.

The final result will be the flower with only the a grey-white squares pattern .

You can save this flower .Now go to the menu and choose : File > Save as
And give the image an name : ( here for intance : clematis1)
Now we do NOT save this image as a jpg , but with the extension PNG (.png)
Otherwise the background would be white , instead of being transparant !!!
 
The final result is a flower that has no background anymore : you can use this .png-images in your building scene. Or you can use them for modeling too . Or you can use them just like here on this webpage (without a background).