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| :::
Tutorials ::: - How to
make your own wallpaper |
| Step 1 - Finding
images for your wallpaper |
| There are two ways to find high quality
images. First, you can use a scanner to get artwork from an art book, but art books are
usually very expensive. Your second option is to search the internet, but most of the
images that are usually found using a generic search engine are often not of the best
quality and therefore shouldn't be used. My suggestion would be to use www.mediaminer.org
to search for high quality images. |
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| Step 2 - Enhancing
images |
| After you find enough images to put
into your wallpaper you might want to adjust how they look before continuing to the next
step. In a perfect world, all of the images that you find will be perfectly suited for
your background, etc. However, this is not usually the case. The first image on the right,
for example, is too dark and rough. These problems are easily fixed by using some basic
filters in Photoshop. The following steps were used to obtain the final image on the far
right: |
Adjusting the image's brightness:
1.) In the image menu, open the sub menu called adjust, then click on the Hue
/ Saturation option. You can use the sliders in the menu that pops up to adjust color
and brightness levels. You should play around with these options to see which settings are
the best for your image. |
Smoothing the image:
This is really simple. In the filter menu, open the sub menu called blur and
use the bluring filter called Gaussian Blur. Lower values will blur less, and
higher values will blur more. |
Making images clearer:
Your image may look perfectly fine by this point, but an additional step is required to
make the image that we are using look nicer. We will now unsharpen the image. Again, in
the filter menu, select the sharpen sub menu and use the unsharp mask.
Again, you might want to adjust the values, but the defaults are usually ok. |
And as you can see, the enhanced image (far right) looks much nicer than what we started
with. :) |
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Extracting characters from images: |
| For this example, we will cut out the
character in the center of the image on the right. This is usually a time consuming
process, but using the quick mask option will make your life easier. 1.) Using your
favorite selection tool, draw a general area outside of the character you want to copy.
2.) Turn on quick mask mode. (It's the button on the bottom of the tool bar that looks
like a dotted circle that's surrounded by a grey color.)
* Notice that after selecting quick mask mode, a pink color will appear on the outside
of the selection that you made.
3.) Using the paint brush tool, drawing with a black color will decrease the
selection area, and using a white color will increase the selection area. (It's
best to experiment when you first use this.)
4.) Turn off quick mask to get a selection around the desired character (it's to the
left of the button that turned quick mask on.)
5.) You can now copy the selection and paste it onto another layer, or select edit
-> clear to clear the outside of the selection. |
 Click to enlarge |
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 Using images in your wallpaper
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