Read the instructions and mouseover the images for notes about them.

Choose a photo that has bright colours.

1. Open your image in PSP 7.

2. Increase the colours in the image to 16 million by going to the 'Colors' menu, then the 'Increase Color Depth', then '16 million Colors'. (This may be greyed out which means that your pic already has 16 million colours!). This doesn't mean that your image literally has 16 million colours but it means that this number of colours are made available for you to use.

3. Select the 'Selection Tool' on the left, then right -click it and choose 'Tool Options' from the menu that appears.

This opens the 'Tool Options' palette as you see above - which has some options for which ever tool is active on the left (in this case, the Selection Tool!).
From this palette, you can select a shape. I have chosen Rounded Rectangle, Feather: 0 and the Antialias checkbox is ticked.

4.Select a rectangle by clicking in the top left corner, then dragging the mouse down to the bottom right corner of the pic, then release the mouse button.  (Leave a bit of a gap round the edge of the pic!). See below...

5. Now go to the 'Selections' menu and click on 'Invert'. This makes everything selected except your original selection (the rounded rectangle!). See below...

6. Then go to the 'Selections' menu again, then 'Modify', then 'Feather...'.
See below...

Enter '15' for the 'Number of Pixels:'. You can try other amounts next time! Then click 'OK'.

7. Then select the 'Flood fill' tool. See below...

If you are using Paint Shop Pro 6, ignore step 8 and instead, do the following:

Select a foreground colour (if your image is for the web select the same as the background colour you will have on the web page where this image will be displayed). I chose white to match the backgound of this page! The Tool Options palette for the Flood Fill Tool should be set with the Tolerance set to 200, see image below...

8. (For Paint Shop Pro 7 users).
Select a foreground colour ( I have chosen white because the finished image will be displayed on a white web page!). see below left...

Ignore what the background colour is (I have a dark blue as you can see below left...)
 

Make sure that under 'Styles' (see below), that the first box is white (or whatever colour you chose just now!).

If the box isn't a colour, see below...

You can click on the little arrow on the side of this box to select the paintbrush tool. See below...

See below...

10. Then go to the 'Selections' menu and click on 'Select none'.

You may want to crop the image a little - but make sure you don't crop anywhere near the faded edges!

11. Save the image as a .jpg if it's a photograph or a .gif if it's a graphic. This will reduce the filesize if it's for  the web.

If the image is for print, save it as a .psp file to keep the quality at it's best but the filesize will be large - which doesn't matter if it isn't for the web as no one will have to wait for it to download!!

Finished image is below:

You can mess about with it to your hearts content choosing different colour backgrounds before you use the Flood Fill Tool according to the colour of the web page you may want it to appear on.