May 8, 2008

Photoshop: Create Seamless Tile Background made with a Parchment Texture

How-To

Photoshop: Create a Background using a Seamless Tile with a Parchment Texture

This how-to can be used from version 7 and up.

This how-to shows a method of creating seamless tiles for background textures. The how-to uses the "duplicate and flip" method.

The example creates a parchment-paper seamless-tile.


1)   Create a new document of 200 x 200 pixels:

 

01create

The background contents doesn’t matter.


2)   Set the foreground and background colors to a medium brown and cream:
 

02selectColors 03selectColors
 04selectColor

It doesn’t matter which color the foreground and background are set to.


3)   Make some brown/cream variation by rendering clouds. Select Filter -> Render -> Clouds:
 

05clouds

06clouds


4)   Boost the contrast a bit (Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast…):
 

07contrast

08contrast


5)   Add some noise:
 

09noise

10noise


6)   Shrink the image in half:
 

11imageSize

12imageSize


7)   Duplicate the layer three times:
 

13duplicate

14duplicate

You can name the layers if you want.


8)   Flop one copy horizontally, one vertically, and one both horizontally and vertically. Select a layer to flip:
 

15flip

and then use Edit -> Transform and choose either on, "Flip Horizontal" or "Flip Vertical":

16flip


9)   Double the size of the canvas to 200 x 200 pixels:
 

17double

Note anchor the image in one corner.

18double


10)   Move the layers appropriately, i.e. move the horizontally flipped layer to the right, the vertically flipped layer up, and the layer that was flipped both horizontally and vertically to the upper right corner (select the layer and use the move tool):
 

19move  20move


11)   Merge the layers:
 

20merge

21move


12)   Use the Clone Stamp Tool to remove the seems and the mirror "reflections":
 

23cleanup  22merge

Select a size for the tool of about 45 with feathered edges. Before use (or the copied area in later use) set the tool by option-clicking on an area away from the edges that you want to copy. Apply the copied area around the image. It may help to do this step with the image zoomed in (enlarged).


13)  

Save the image as a jpg or gif (File -> Save for Web…) depending on which gives the best result based on image size and quality.

Generally a jpg saved with quality set to 0 (zero) will look OK as a background:

 

24save

25cleanup


14)   Create a webpage to test the image:
 

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
   <title>background test</title>
</head>
<body background="parchment.jpg">
</body>
</html>

26parchment_test

If the image shows seams or mirror "reflections" go back to step 12.


15)   Save the image.


This is the 200 x 200 pixels image produced by the above method.

parchment


March 11, 2008

Kool Image Fluorescent Green Apple

     
  Kool Image

 

Green Apple

Fluorescent Green Apple

 
 

A fluorescent dye injected into a tank of stirred liquid creates a pattern that resembles a green apple. The demonstration, conducted by Rutgers researchers from the NSF Engineering Research Center on Structured Organic Composites, shows how liquids mix in a typical pharmaceutical manufacturing operation. Engineers will use such studies to help drug makers improve product uniformity.

 

Credit: Credit: M. M. Alvarez, T. Shinbrot, F. J. Muzzio, Rutgers University, Center for Structured Organic Composites

   


 

March 10, 2008

Gravity is only a theory!

Cartoon Logo

 

Gravity Is Only A Theory!

February 23, 2008

Site updated

 

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Updated The past week’s re-organization is complete and things are back to normal. WOW!

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February 21, 2008

Optical Illusions

Kool Image

 

Sony Bravia Color 01 Optical Illusion
Optical Illusion Sony Bravia Color Image 01

This print advertisement formed part of Sony’s successful Bravia campaign in the UK and Argentina. This is the best of the four print ads in the series.

Go ahead and stare at it. It will vibrate till you are crazy. Some viewers have said it looks like the snake’s eyes in The Jungle Book movie.

The type of optical illusion used in the ad is called physiological illusion.

These are caused by the effects on the eyes and brain from excessive stimulation of a specific type - brightness, tilt, color, movement. Here brightness and color combine to make the effect.

It is believed the stimuli have in the early stages of visual processing, individual dedicated neural paths. When only one or a few channels have continual stimulation, a physiological imbalance develops that alters perception.
Wikipedia Optical Illusion

 

Sony Bravia Color 02 Optical Illusion
Optical Illusion Sony Bravia Color Image 02

This print advertisement formed part of Sony’s successful Bravia campaign in the UK and Argentina. This is the one of the four print ads in the series.

Move the image slowly around the screen to cause the image to develop waviness. The largest image size works best.

The type of optical illusion used in the ad is called physiological illusion.

These are caused by the effects on the eyes and brain from excessive stimulation of a specific type - brightness, tilt, color, movement. Here movement plays a big part in the illusion.

It is believed the stimuli have in the early stages of visual processing, individual dedicated neural paths. When only one or a few channels have continual stimulation, a physiological imbalance develops that alters perception.
Wikipedia Optical Illusion

 

Sony Bravia Color 03 Optical Illusion
Optical Illusion Sony Bravia Color Image 03

This print advertisement formed part of Sony’s successful Bravia campaign in the UK and Argentina. This is the one of the four print ads in the series.

The type of optical illusion used in the ad is called a scintillating grid illusion, a sub-type of physiological illusion.

These are caused by the effects on the eyes and brain from excessive stimulation of a specific type - brightness, tilt, color, movement.

It is believed the stimuli have in the early stages of visual processing, individual dedicated neural paths. When only one or a few channels have continual stimulation, a physiological imbalance develops that alters perception.
Wikipedia Optical Illusion

The grid “is constructed by superimposing white discs on the intersections of orthogonal gray bars on a black background. Dark dots seem to appear and disappear rapidly at random intersections, hence the label “scintillating”. When a person keeps his or her eyes directly on a single intersection, the dark dot does not appear. The dark dots disappear if one is too close or too far from the image.

“Observations suggest that a minimum of 3 x 3 evenly spaced intersections with superimposed discs are required to produce the effect. This requirement suggests the participation of global processes of the kind proposed for the linking and grouping of features in an image, in addition to local processes.”
Wikipedia Optical Illusion - Grid Illusion

 

Sony Bravia Color 04 Optical Illusion
Optical Illusion Sony Bravia Color Image 04

This print advertisement formed part of Sony’s successful Bravia campaign in the UK and Argentina. This is the one of the four print ads in the series.

The type of optical illusion used in the ad is called physiological illusion.

These are caused by the effects on the eyes and brain from excessive stimulation of a specific type - brightness, tilt, color, movement. Here brightness and color combine to make the effect.

It is believed the stimuli have in the early stages of visual processing, individual dedicated neural paths. When only one or a few channels have continual stimulation, a physiological imbalance develops that alters perception.
Wikipedia Optical Illusion

 

Credit: Sony

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