Shapes with Texture and Deformations
Basic Circle
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The concept of this tutorial is to use a variety of PSP5's tools to create some interesting shapes using PSP's deformation tools. And we have a few texture bonuses too.
Open a new image 300 X 300 with the Background color set to Black.
 Set your Foreground color to White (#FFFFFF or 255,255,255) and your Background color to Black (#000000 or 0,0,0) in the Color Palette.
 *Note* You can create this graphic much smaller and achieve the same effects, but for the purpose of seeing everything that's going on in this tutorial, Bigger Is Better! Go to File | Preferences | General Program Preferences | Rulers and Units and set the grid spacing with the Display Units in Pixels and both Horizontal and Vertical to 150. I have my Line Color set to Red. Click OK.
Go to View | Grids and make sure they are checked.
 You should see red lines that cross right in the middle of your image. Made sure that your Layers Palette is showing (Press L on the keyboard to toggle the Layers Palette on and off.) Click on the new layer button, (the little box in the bottom left hand corner that looks like files next to the little garbage can) and name this one Circle, leave the rest of the boxes alone and click OK.
Click on the Shapes Tool
With the Circle layer as the active layer, place your cursor in the center of the image where the lines cross in the middle and draw a big circle.
 (You can go up to View | Grids and turn the Grids off if you like, we just used them to find the center of the image easily.) Select the background of the Circle Layer by using the Magic Wand with the Match Mode set to RGB, Tolerance set to 1 and Feather set to 0. Invert the selection so you have the circle selected.
 Go to Image | Noise | Add and select Uniform noise set to 100% and click OK.
 *Note* You can add more Noise if you like. Noise is a wonderful tool to play with and you can create some great textures by using different levels of Noise.
Now go up to Colors | Grayscale and your Noise will automatically be black and white. Now go back up to Colors | Increase Color Depth and change back to 16 Million Colors (24 bit).
 (You can also use Shift + Control + 0 to take it back to 16 million colors.) Now we are going to blur the Noise by going up to Image | Blur | Gaussian Blur and setting the Radius to 1.19. Click OK.
 Go back up to Image | Blur and select Motion Blur this time. Set the Direction to 90 Degrees and the Pixels to 40. Click OK.  Next we are going to smooth the outside edges a bit. Go to Selections | Contract set to 2 pixels and click OK. Go back up to Selections and Invert the selection so the background is selected. Go up to Image | Blur | Blur More. Go ahead and do another Blur More.
 We are now going to get set up for the fun part! Go up to Selections | Invert so the Circle is now selected again and go back up to Selections and pick Expand this time. Expand by 6 pixels and click OK.
 Now we will save our Image in the .psp format. I saved mine as circle.psp (what a lack of originality.....*grin*). Go ahead and make a couple copies of your circle button (Shift + D or Window | Duplicate). On the Next page we will play with some deformations of our circle button. |
and select the Circle Filled with anitialias checked.
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| Next |
| Basic Circle |
| Pinch |
| Skew Horizontal |
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Perspective Horizontal
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