The quarter tile used as an example here was made from a selection from a fractal Generated with Kai's Power Tools used within PaintShop. You can see the fractal in the Gold Collection. All of the cutting, pasting, and image manipulation was done within WindowsPaint (PaintShop). The image was imported back into Paintshop to be converted into a JPEG file.
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In selecting portions of an image to turn into a quarter tile, it is important to consider symmetry about the diagonal of the square to be selected. The square can be of any size but I find that a 50 pixel square is adequate and easy to manipulate. |
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Copy the square from the source program (in this case, PaintShop, and paste it into Paint. |
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With the square still selected, hold down the CONTROL key, click on the square, ad drag a copy of the image to an adjacent part of the page. |
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Either click on the image menu and choose 'Flip/Rotate' or type CTRL-R. |
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From the dialogue which pops up, choose 'Flip horizontal'. |
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Click on the now horizontally flipped square and move it to just meet the original square. |
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Hold down the control key and click on the still selected and flipped second quarter. Drag it to an adjacent area. |
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Pull down the image menu and choose flip/rotate. Click on 'Flip vertical'. Alternatively, type CTRL-RV. The third quarter of the tile is then flipped vertically. |
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The third quarter of the tile is then flipped vertically and is still selected. |
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Drag the third quarter, which has been flipped both horizontally and vertically when compared to the original, to just meet the first two quarters. Make sure that the right edges align, too. |
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Repeat the process with the fourth quarter. This time flip it horizontally instead of vertically. |
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Your tile is now complete. Now select the whole tile. |
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In PaintBrush, you can now use 'Copy to...' in the edit menu to save the tile as a bitmap. Alternatively, type CTRL-C to copy the tile to the clipboard. Go to paintshop and type CTRL-V. The tile is pasted into PaintShop as a new image. |
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Browsers require GIFs of JPEGs rather than bitmaps to if you have not pasted the image directly into Paintshop, Open the bitmap in PaintShop. Then under the file menu, choose 'Save As...'. You will get a dialog in which you can choose the name and file type for the image. |
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You can choose to save the image as a JPG or a GIF. If you save it as a gif, make sure that you reduce the colors to 256 BEFORE you Save As. That way, you can pick the color reduction parameters. Otherwise, you get the defaults which are not so good. In either case, click the options button. If you are using a GIF, choose 89a non-interlaced. If JPG, choose 300 DPI and a compression level of 15. |