Creating Web Graphics with Paint Shop Pro 5.0

Two sources for Web graphics:

• Since I often write about our travels for a personal Web site and family newsletters, I frequently use maps availabale from National Geographic (http://www.nationalgeographic.com). NG makes these maps available to individuals for use in personal, non-commercial Web sites and publications.
• Free Web graphics are available at Be Seen (http://beseen.com/beseen/free). These are unusual graphics: backgrounds, bullets, buttons, lines, and even animaged GIFS with cool colors and modern, sleek design.

I cropped a photo of my husband holding our niece, Mary, to isolate Mary—red eye and all. The photo comes from a picture CD obtained when the film was processed.	Mary looks less diabolical here because I removed red eye by selecting the affected area, using the eye dropper to pick up the predominant eye color from a nearby pixel, then pouring that color into the selected area. Of course, an easier way to do this would have been to open the photo in Microsoft Picture It! and click on “correct red eye.”

Deformations

First, I resized the original picture to 33% of its original size so that I could display two deformations side by side on my Web page.

circle deformation	vertical cylinder, 69%

punch, 70%	wind, strength 14, from left

Effects

Original image, a rectangle 60 x 30 pixels filled with purple

buttonize, height=2, width=2, opacity=75, solid edge	chisel, size=50	drop shadow, black, opacity=50, blur=5; offset, vertical=8, horizontal=8. Obviously, one would not want to reproduce this effect for use on a Web page.

Filters

original	filter applied: soften

But I really wanted to apply filters to this image:
 

I chose this image (which I cropped from a larger photo) because it has interesting lines that I thought would illustrate well the effects of filters.

edge enhance more	trace contour

emboss	hot wax

motion blur, direction=20 degrees, intensity=5 pixels	unsharp mask, radius=2.5, strength=100%, clipping=5

Gaussian blur, radius=1.0	Gaussian blur, radius=3.0

Scanners and Digital Cameras

My husband took this photo with his digital camera, a Sony Mavica. (And yes, those are the actual colors.) The Mavica uses ordinary computer disks to store images. We find this storage method to be an advantage because you do not have to hook the camera up to a computer periodically to dump the pictures. But you do have to carry around a slew of disks!

This image, which I cropped for use in exploring filters (above), was scanned into Paint Shop Pro with a Visioneer OneTouch 7600 scanner. This scanner offers two resolutions for color scanning: 100 and 200 DPI. I scanned this photo at 200 DPI.