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Okay, ready? Tutorials have always confounded me.
Not that I'm stupid, but when I'm reading something online I like it to
be straight and to the point. There are many wonderful tutorial sites
(probably more effective than mine) that I will provide links for, but
this site is designed for the absolute beginner! Some knowledge
of standard graphic program terms is helpful here, but not necessary.
Enough of that, let's cut to the chase. To use this tutorial properly,
you should either print these pages, or download
Paint Shop Pro 5 and install it, open the program and follow along,
going from window to window for each step.
First, to create a background like those included in my Graphics
Sets, we begin with a picture that we're fond of, or as in this
case, whatever picture is currently set as wallpaper. I chose this
one because it was there at the time:
Original Image Size= 512 x
384 Pixels
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Okay, using the SELECTION TOOL (it looks like
a dotted rectangle on the tool bar), with the CONTROL
PALETTE WINDOW (that's a little floating window named controls
- it's activated by pressing the button that looks like a window with an
up and down arrow on it between the magnifying glass and the and the rainbow-looking
button) set to SELECTION TYPE=ELLIPSE,
FEATHER=0, ANTI
ALIAS IS NOT
CHECKED, select an area that you'd like to
focus around [NOTE:
When using the Circle or Ellipse Selection Tools, start selecting in the
center of the areas you want selected]. While the area
is selected, choose SELECT
(from the topmost toolbar - the one that starts with File), then choose
CONVERT TO SEAMLESS PATTERN
from the drop-down menu. This will provide you with seamless tiles
to use in various ways (I refer to them as FILL images, but you'll
get that later) as shown below. These are the tiles I chose from
the picture above:
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Image 1
218 x 118 Pixels
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Image 2
182 x 224 Pixels
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Now, when working with tiles, especially if you plan to combine them in
any way, I find it best that the height and/or width be an even multiple
of 25 (i.e., 50, 75, 100, etc.). This makes the image size calculations
much easier to work with, as you'll see below. We'll begin
by making a picture tile for use as a tiled background. First, we
resize Image 1 by choosing IMAGE from the
topmost toolbar, then RESIZE, which brings
up the RESIZE WINDOW. Here you
choose PIXEL SIZE, HEIGHT=50
(which automatically sets the size for the width at 92), making sure that
RESIZE TYPE=SMART SIZE,
and RESIZE ALL LAYERS and MAINTAIN
ASPECT RATIO ARE CHECKED
and click OKAY. Image 1 is now 50(h)
x 92(w). I repeated the same procedure for Image 2, however, I made
it 200(h) x 162(w).
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Now what? Well, the knight or the dragon by themselves would be pretty
boring (at least, my idea of boring), so we're going to combine
them. Paint Shop Pro has already done the work of making a large
seamless tile for us, so we'll use that as our NEW
IMAGE size. In the NEW IMAGE WINDOW,
we choose the same height and width of our largest tile. In this
case, WIDTH=162
HEIGHT=200 in
PIXELS, RESOLUTION=400 PIXELS/INCH,
IMAGE TYPE=16.7 MILLION COLORS (24-BIT)
[NOTE: If you aren't working in 16
million colors, many of the features won't work. I like to reduce
my finished file to 256 colors, this will bring your file size down, and
make your images look good to almost everyone. You can then increase
the file size back to 16 million colors and save it as a jpg file, which
results in a smaller file size than a gif file does. I only use gif
for transparency or animations, but that's another tutorial.] and choose
OKAY.
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"Why would we want to do that?", you're probably asking. Even if
you're not, I'll tell you. First, we're going to tile the dragon
picture on our new image. Choose FLOOD FILL
(that little paint can dripping on the toolbar), now on the CONTROL
PALETTE WINDOW (which will automatically change to the flood
fill controls), we choose FILL STYLE=PATTERN,
MATCH MODE=NONE,
TOLERANCE=0,
OPACITY=100 (that's percentage), SAMPLE
MERGED IS NOT
CHECKED, now click on OPTIONS.
This opens the FLOOD FILL OPTIONS WINDOW.
Choose FILL STYLE=PATTERN
(which should already be chosen for you), BLEND MODE=NORMAL,
NEW PATTERN SOURCE=IMAGE 1 (In this
example it does, anyway. You can double-check in the preview window
below the pattern box. Now CLICK INSIDE OF
THE NEW IMAGE and the dragon image (well, at least that's was tiled
in mine) will be tiled upon it. Now for the cool stuff, REPEAT
ALL THE STUFF IN THIS PARAGRAPH except CHANGE
OPACITY TO 50, and CHANGE
PATTERN SOURCE to
IMAGE 2 (which in this case is the
knight). Now CLICK ON TOP OF THE TILED IMAGE
and you get the following result:
To see this on a page, just
click on the image.
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Before saving your image, choose COLORS on
the topmost toolbar, then DECREASE COLOR DEPTH,
and 256 COLORS (8 BIT). Go to FILE,
SAVE AS, press CTRL+J
(for jpg file type), choose a FILE NAME (do
not bother with the file extension, since it's automatically chosen as
jpg already), choose OPTIONS and the SAVE
OPTIONS WINDOW will open. I use STANDARD
ENCODING with COMPRESSION FACTOR=50.
I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but it works for me (maybe I should
try to find another tutorial on this subject~hmmmm...). Now click
SAVE. A window will pop-up with a lot
of stuff about having to increase the color depth, etc. Just click
OKAY.
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
If you've been following along (switching from browser window to your
Paint Shop Pro 5 window), you've just
created your first picture overlay background tile. But it was boring,
remember. Or, maybe it's just the picture I chose. It obviously
wasn't one that I believed would make a great graphic or it would be displayed
in my graphics section. But it's a good example of how you can
make a picture more exciting. But now we're gonna make it even more
exciting by creating a seamless repeat edge pattern. Ready?
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