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This page is merely a "get you started out" primer. It is designed just to
get your feet wet and interested in really getting to know about the fun of
playing with graphics. It really is not a tutorial, but just some steps
I took to get going myself. There are probably better and faster ways to do
some of this. These are just the ways I stumbled upon. I'd love to hear
about how I could have done it better. I'm hoping that we can all work
together and develop something really worthwhile here. Please feel free to
correct, change and add to anything here. I confess to a secret hope that
you will all do just that and make this your own. Copy it to your computer.
Change anything here. I'm hoping that we might do something similar with each
topic in the class. Kinda create a reference place for ourselves on all topics.
With that in mind, here goes.
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Let me make clear right off the bat that what I am going to be talking about
is making original graphics from drawings that you make yourself. I have not
dealt with photographs at all. There is an entirely different technique
involved in "manipulating" photographs that I have not yet explored. The
graphics I have created for the Bracketeers page and my homepage may be a bit
amateurish yet, but I thought you it might be useful to those of you who
have not yet ventured to do your own to know how I did what I did.
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I have used three programs, Microsoft Paint (comes with your windows package
and probably with Macs too), PhotoImpact by Ulead, and GIF Construction Set
by Alchemy Mindworks. PhotoImpact (don't be misled by the name) essentially
does the same job as PaintshopPro. (I just got Paintshop Pro a couple of weeks
ago as a late Christmas present and haven't had time to play with it yet.) I
should probably also point out here that I do not have a conventional mouse,
but a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball. The difference is that the ball
rotates within a static container. It does not roll around a pad. This may
give me some extra control when drawing, I'm not sure.
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The first step is to draw something. Please note that you do not have to be
an artist to do this. You can make something as simple as a plain button with
type on it. You can use the circle, oval, and square tool to make simple
shapes and designs. Or, using your handy dandy mouse, you can bravely try to
draw something. Usually I use black to draw with on a white background and
then fill in the colors with the paint pail later. In my paint program,
there is a handy function in the View item on the menu that allows you to
enlarge the working image without affecting the size of the "real" image in
its normal view. When you are reasonably happy with the result, you save it
as a bitmap, i.e. image.bmp.
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Now you can open it up in PhotoImpact (or Paintshop Pro) and play with it!
You can make buttons, you can Change the hue (saturation,etc.), the brightness,
crop, sharpen, blur, emboss, and the list of manipulations goes on and on.
Note that to use most of the effects, it is usually necessary to increase the
number of colors in the image. When you are finished playing, then convert
the image back to browser safe colors and save it as a gif. Being more of the
hands on type than the read all about it first type, I just play with the
effects (there are preview options) and see what they do. What works on one
thing may look awful on another! Just play and have fun. If you mess up
royally here and still want your original graphic, just go back to your .bmp
file and start again!
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Hey, you've made a nifty little image and now you'd like to animate it!
You'll have to go back to MS Paint to do this, hope you've saved your .bmp
file! To get the hang of it, I'd like to suggest that you start with a
simple text image. I did this with the I Love New York gif for my homepage.
In MS Paint, I made a text image of just those letters. I made the background
black (so I could easily make it transparent later in the GIF Construction
Set) and then alternated the letters with white and red. I saved it as a
bmp file (ex, iluvny.bmp) but kept it on the Paint screen. Now, using the
paint can, I made the red letters white and the white letters red. I saved
it as the same name with a higher number (ex, iluvny2.bmp). To make these
files as small as possible, I opened them in PhotoImpact and converted them
to web save colors and saved them as gif files. Next, I opened
the GIF Construction Set, used the animation wizard to select my two gif
files. It has added a header at the top of the file and a control file
before each gif. Now I "view" the animation. I decided it was ok and would
do for now. I then picked the manage button from the menu. In the box that
opens up, I selected all. I picked the set all existing controls button and
pushed apply. I selected black as my transparent color. Then I saved the
file as a gif file.
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The most important thing is to get in there and play! I hope this helps
just a wee bit. Perhaps my greatest contribution will have been to make
errors that you can pick out and avoid. Anyway, enough of my blather.
Let me give you some small demonstrations.
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Simple transparency |
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Playing with special effects and color in PhotoImpact |
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Simple button in MS Paint only! |
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Simple animated button, step by step |
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Simple animated gifs |
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