Entries Tagged 'backgrounds' ↓

I had a question from a flirt earlier today. She had followed the tutorial for putting buttons in tables, which shows you how to put buttons in tables with neat labels with each button, so your purchaser can see what they are.

The tutorial is intended to produce a table that looks something like this.

The problem was that her page had a black background. She had changed the text on her page to another color, using an html tag like this:

But the font in the table remained black, and did not show up because the background was also black. The labels were there, but nobody could read them.

Unfortunately, when you set the font color, size, and face for a page in html, it does not affect the color of anything within a table. You need to set that color inside each cell to get them to change.

So her table looked like this:

I’m going to set the font as “arial”, which is the Niteflirt default. You can, of course, choose any font you want, remembering that if you pick a weird one that your visitor may not have installed, something else will appear. I’m going to set the color to “white”. Not all color names will work on Niteflirt. If you like a named color but it doesn’t show up on Niteflirt, you should download a color picker to find the proper hex code for that color. Then I’m going to set the size to 3, which is one size larger than the standard Niteflirt squinty size of 2. And for good measure I’m going to make it bold, so it will be easier to read.

I will set the font properties within a single <font> tag, but the bold must be separate. Both must come before the text. So they can be the first thing inside the cell, or they can be just before the text you are trying to format. So you can see where the table cell ends, I’m going to put the ‘td’ and ‘/td’ tags. What I’ve put in bold and red will be your Niteflirt button code, if you are not substituting a button image of your own.

<td><a href="http://niteflirt_button_code"><img src="http://your_image_url"></a><br><font face="arial" color="white" size="3"><b>Button Label</td>

Normally in html you would also put end tags, but we’re trying to save space on Niteflirt, and when it doesn’t matter, we leave them out. You would need to end the font, size, or color if you wanted to change any of those.

I have wanted to do a lot of tutorials in Paintshop Pro, but I’m often stopped by the fact that a simple tutorial intended to help a newbie master a single technique often produces something that is less than a work of art, while techniques can get lost in tutorials that produce complex works of art.

Of course, my other beef with a lot of tutorials is that the newbie will have to download a lot of “materials”, including tubes, brushes, filters, and sometimes even buy them. In the end, if the newbie ends up following directions correctly and finishing whatever it is, she can’t really use it (the copyright still belongs to the designer) and the individual techniques have gotten lost in the details.

I’m sure you’ve seen lots of background images on myspace and other member sites where the images just repeats. It doesn’t match at all. There are just ugly seams.

I’m going to show you how to tile a background using Paintshop Pro. It’s a pretty simple way to do it. There are lots of other ways to do it, too, but let’s not get into that right now. If you’re interested in doing some research, there’s a link at the bottom of this tutorial where you can find out ways some artists do it.

Here is my baby Maude, hiding in plain sight on a rug.

Here she is tiled into a background.

Here we are in Paintshop Pro with the image open. Although impressive images can be made from big photos, they can take a very long time to load. So it’s better to plan on having a smaller image repeat. I reduced Maude’s photo greatly to make it this convenient size.

Select Effects=>Image Effects=>Seamless Tiling

This window pops up.

There are a lot of settings you can adjust in this window. I find that the “corner” and “bidirectional” tend to give less vertical and horizontal effect. You can zoom your view. You can also click the die on the far right to get random settings. If you lose yourself in random settings and want to get back, go up to the top and dropdown the preset menu. Choose “factory default”. You should play with the settings sometime to get a feel for what they can do.

I’m going to tick the “Show tiling preview” box, which will bring up a preview window.

This looks okay. You can adjust the magnification to see it better if you like.

Close it and hit the ‘OK’ button. Maude is now tiled.

The page

For lots more info on tiling backgrounds and even some freebies, Visit this blog, where you’ll find a collection of tutorial links halfway down the page. I’ve looked at a few of them. You can do some amazing things, but have your patience ready!