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Create Web Graphics with Paint Shop Pro

Lesson 2

Note: All images are created using Paint Shop Pro 6.

Assignment 1: Sites for Web art

Here are a couple of places in my own bookmark file:

Assignment 2: Photo cropping and retouching

First, here is a large image. This is a scan of a photo of me and two of my dogs. (I have four dogs and a cat.) This image is 89K, and way too large for most Web purposes.

This image is not only way too large, but my dog Shannon has rather bright eyes. Not red, but worth making some changes. First, I crop the image to get just Shannon.

This is better. I used a compression setting of 20 on the cropped JPEG image, and now the file size is 6k. Even with the higher compression, the image is not bad. Now I need to do something about those eyes.

I used the Magic Wand, as described in the text. but it seemed like I needed to adjust the settings. I ended up changing small groups of pixels each time, instead of selecting the whole area. But this turned out to work better here since I wanted to keep just hint of brightness around the edges of the eyes, and I could do that this way.

This is the same photo, but resized. Now the file size is 4.5K.

Assignment 3: Deformations

I was really happy to learn about the Deformation Browser. I was trying to use some of these deformations in Week One, on text, and didn't get very good results. It looks like some things are better used on photos. Again, I let my girl be the star.

This is the above photo with the Curly-Q deformation applied. The settings were 18 rows, 18 columns, Symmetric, size 79%, strength 22, clockwise.

Here's my girl with the Spiky Halo Deformation. The settings were horizontal offset 15%, vertical offset 15%, radius 37%, amplitude 62, and frequency 25.

Here is one last deformation. I used the Ripple deformation, with the settings amplitude=20, wavelength=82, horizontal center=52, vertical center=62.

Assignment 4: Button, button, who's got the button?

For all of these buttons I made a few basic choices. The font is Harlow Solid Italic, size=6. I then used a grass paper texture, and a color of (204,0,0) to paint the text. The background is white.

Here I began with Chisel, size=14, background color. I then used Buttonize, height=15, width=15, opacity=100, and transparent edge.

Here I began with Cutout, interior color=(204,0,0), shadow color=(255,255,255), opacity=67, blur=15, vertical offset=5, horizontal offset=-5. I then applied Buttonize with height=10, width=15, opacity=63, and transparent edge.

This button began with Drop Shadow, color=(0,0,0), opacity=100, blur=0, vertical=2, horizontal=-4. Then I used Buttonize, height=9, width=9, opacity=100, solid edge.

Here I have combined several effects in one button. I began with Glowing Edges, intensity=7, sharpness=64. Then I collapsed the layers and applied Blinds, width=2, opacity=23, color=(0,0,0), horizontal, light from left/top. Finally I used Buttonize, height=9, width=9, opacity=100, solid edge.

Discussion note on buttons:

The first three buttons used the effects discussed in the text. For the fourth, I wanted to do a little experimenting. The Blinds effect, in particular, adds a certain finished look I quite liked.

In saving the images, I elected to use JPEG formats. Normally, you might expect that GIF would be preferable because these are line art rather than photos. However, the effects used, and in particular the gradient used by the Buttonize effect, led to far too much dithering when I looked at them as GIFs. Here is an example of a button saved as a GIF.

Here you can see the severe dithering in the image. This is basically the same image as the fourth button above, but it looks much worse. Saving as a JPEG resulted in a 7K file, while the GIF was 5K. But the results are worth it, in my opinion.

Assingment 5: Filters

My girl Shannon is once again the star of the show. This time, I took the fourth image (the resized, retouched image), added a text legend, and then applied filters.

This is Edge Enhance.

This is Trace Contour.

This is a filter I created, so it doesn't have a name yet. Maybe I should have a "Name the Filter" contest. What do you think?

This is a filter I downloaded from http://www.asan.com/users/kangaroo/graphics.htm?. Yes, I started with the same picture of Shannon for this. The filter is Kang-1, Bracelets for Mona.

Assignment 6: Image Arithmetic

Here I begin with a clip-art image from a CD-ROM collection called Holy Cow, from Macmillan Digital Publishing.

I then created this image in PSP 6 to be the same size. This was created using Sunburst Gradient, blend mode=normal, paper texture=grass, match mode=RGB value, tolerance=20, opacity=100.

I used Image Arithmetic, with the grass set as image #1 and the Frog set as image #2. Other settings were function=add, all channels, clip color values, divisor=1, bias=0. The grass seems have gotten lost in all this.

This attempt used the same images and settings, except that I replaced "add" with "darkest". Still not quite the effect I wanted.

Assignment 7: Negative, Posterize, Solarize

This is the Negative of the retouched, resized Image #4 above.

Here she is posterized, level=4.

Here she is solarized, with a threshhold=51.

Optional Assignment 8: Frames

This used the Antique Marble picture frame that came with PSP 6. I think my pretty girl deserves such a nice frame as a reward after all of the things I did to her in this lesson.