Paint Shop Pro by JASC
How to make a basic button in PSP 9
By by Penny Dutcher
Sep 22, 2004, 11:43

Then go to Selection, click on the selection tool. 

In this case we are going to use the circle selection type. 

Make sure that anti-alias is checked.

To control your selection, start in the center of your image and drag the circle down.  To make your button approximately an inch big, the circle should take up about 75 percent of the space.  You should now have a circular image with the “ants running around it”. 

Now you have to decide what color you want your button to be. 

Put this color in the foreground color box.

As you can see above, the foreground box is the top box or gray box.    Click in the center of the box and your materials property box should appear and your cursor will automatically turn into the color dropper.  When this appears you can click on any small color box, around the color circle, in the large center box or you can enter your color number in the box marked HTML, if you know it.  I have chosen a pink color from the small color boxes.

so now my foreground box looks like this:

I now use the flood fill tool (the one that looks like the paint bucket)

by clicking on it and then placing the bucket any where inside the selection or circle in our case, click again.  Our circle should now be flood filled with the color of your choice or whatever color was in the foreground color box.

Now while the circle is still selected (has the running ants around it) we are going to bevel the outer edge of our button.  To do this we need to go to effects/3d/inner bevel.

I set my controls as follows but I’d suggest playing with all of them to become more familiar with them but to also change the edge of your button.

This is what my image looks like to this point:

Now to make the button holes.

Go up to selections and select none.

Your running ants should be gone from the outer edge of your circle.

Now we are going to make smaller circular selections for our button holes.

We go back to the selection tools and select the selection tool and the circular type.

I first select the first hole or circular shape and this may take several tries before you get your hole in the right place.   To do the second hole

you need to press the shift key down while you work. This will allow to you have two selections at the same time.  If you make a mistake with the selection tool, go to edit/undo and try again.  You can also do the holes one at a time and you can make a button with four holes.

This is what mine looks like:

Now, while both holes are selected, press your delete or del button.

Now your image should look like this:

While the holes are selected, we are going to bevel them.

So go to selections/invert and click. 

Now the running ants will remain on the inner holes

but will also being going around the whole image box.

We now have to go to effects/3d/inner bevel and can use the same settings as before.

Our button is almost done and should look like mine below:

You can now add shadow to your button or if you are going to share it, do NOT add a shadow as individuals prefer to add their own shadows to match the shadows in their photographs or layout.  You can also crop the excess background out to make this a smaller sized element.  Finally save your button using png format so you can save the transparency of the background and the button holes.  Your final button should look something like this:

Congratulations!!!  You've made your first button!!!