Tutorial: How to create Backgrounds with the Tesselation FilterThe first thing you will need to do if you wish to study this tutorial is to visit www.flamingpear.com and download the Tessalation Filter which is available for a 14 day trial. You can purchase later if you want to. I usually put all Zip files containing installable programs into my Programs folder so that I can find them easily. Scan the Zip file with your anti-virus - you can't be too careful. Unzip the file you have just downloaded and scanned, and copy and paste the files it contains in your Flaming Pear folder (if you have one) which is in your Plugins folder within Paint Shop Pro. If you do not already have a Flaming Pear folder within your Plugins folder, just paste the filter files straight into the Plugins folder. Remember if Paint Shop Pro is already open when you install the filter it won't show up - you will have to close PSP down and start it up again. Open a new image, 100 x 100, resolution 72.000, Pixels, Pixels/inch, Background color is Transparent, 16.7 Million Colours (24 bit). To create a simple background first of all make sure your Foreground Styles button has a pattern selected. Click on the little arrow at the right and click on the Pattern button.  Set the Textures selector tabs to Null by clicking on the null button which is at the far right, also select the Styles background selector tab to Null. Make sure the Lock box is selected.  I chose one of the green patterns that comes with Paint Shop Pro for my background. When the pattern is showing, click on it to bring up the Styles toolbox. Select any pattern you want, play around using different effects to see what you can come up with. When you have something you like, come back to the lesson. I added one of the Textures from Effects-Texture Effects-Textures and then applied the HSB Noise filter from the Eye Candy 3.1 collection that comes with PSP. Both were left at default.  Now click on Effects-Plug-in Filters-Flaming Pear-Tesselation.  You will see that what it does is select an area of your image to tesselate (the black area). You won't know what the effect is until you try this one in your browser, so click on OK without changing whatever it's chosen. A new image will appear in Paint Shop Pro which is your background with a transparent area to the right and bottom.  Now we need to crop the image. Click on the Crop tool.
Click anywhere on your image and start to drag. Grey lines will appear; select the pattern part of your image so that none of the transparent area is within the selected area, and if necessary drag the top and left hand grey lines until the whole background image is covered. You do not want any of the transparent area showing when you have cropped. Click on Crop Image in the Tool Options box.  Now it's time to save your image. For web images such as backgrounds, I usually click on File-Export-Gif Optimiser. For this one I select "None" for the Transparency option, and click on the Colours tab to select the Optimised Octree option for colour type. Check under Format to make sure the Non-Interlaced radio button is selected, click on OK and save your image. Before you can publish your backgrounds on the Web, you need to check they look all right. I keep a file especially for this purpose, just a plain vanilla HTML file with only the <HTML>, <HEAD>, <TITLE> and <BODY> tags and place the filename of the background image in the <BODY> tag. That's the fun part - when you see for the first time whether your background is OK or not. Open up your browser and have a look - if it's working you're away, if not, back to the drawing board! This particular background creates a rather obvious tiling effect, so it's not quite perfect - I would normally these days use something rather more subtle but it would certainly do for layering behind a table. Click Here to see an example of the background made for this tutorial! In this tutorial you will be creating your own image from scratch and you may therefore use anything you make from it anywhere you like - on stationery, for personal purposes or on your web site - images you make from my tutorials are yours. If you do use any images made from it a link back would be appreciated but is not an absolute requirement. Please do not sell this tutorial, upload it to your own server or send them through e-mail. You may save them to your hard drive and to CD for backup purposes only. Please do not link directly to my images. If you wish to use my images on your business site, please contact me. Groups if you feel there is something here your members can learn from you are most welcome to share this site, please let me know beforehand via the e-mail link at the bottom of this page, and let me see your group results - I would love to see what you do with the tutorials, and would also like to link back to you.
Copyright © Gillian Buchanan 2003 |
