PHOTOSWIZZLE Picture Frame Help - Creating Your Own Textures

Creating your own textures isn't as difficult as you might think. Let's start by examining the molding texture used for the frames on these pages as an example. The images below show the texture at actual size and at 6x magnification.

Actual Size, 25x25 pixels		6x Magnification

The magnified view shows that it's primarily just a stack of solid horizontal lines of different colors. One section has a few diagonal lines one pixel wide. The placement and angle of the diagonal lines is the only tricky part. All of it can be done easily with the line drawing tool of your graphics editor.

So let's build a molding for the image on the left. We start by estimating what size we want the frame to be. For example, the image on the left is 233h x 191w pixels. Something less than 20% would proabably be about right so that it wouldn't cover any of the rose other than part of the stem on the bottom. 20% of the smaller dimension (width, 191 pixels) is 38 pixels.

But corner matching is tricky and the easiest way to get the corners to match with a small texture is to size it so that an exact multiple fits into the image. This may not be possible for the image size that you are working with so one way to solve the problem is to settle on a texture size that will be a close fit and then resize the image canvas to be an exact multiple of the texture size. An alternative is to use the Auto Size control in Picture Frame+ which is designed to help with frame sizing in such a situation.

We decide to use 25 x 25 as the texture size and resize the image canvas to 250 x 200. So the texture will tile exactly 10 times horizontally in the image and 8 times vertically. The resizing will add some extra empty space around the outside of the original image but that will be filled in by the frame.

We create a new square image 25 x 25 pixels and draw the horizontal lines in several colors and widths, filling the image completely. Then we save the image in one of the two formats that Picture Frame recognizes, .jpg or .png, in this case we choose .jpg. It is best to select the highest possible quality settings that the graphics editor allows because that will minimize compression and keep the colors solid and separated as much as possible. This is highly desirable for getting the corners to match properly. That's it, we now have a texture to build the frame!

Now a little more about the diagonal lines and corner matching. The primary rule for good corner matching is basic left to right symmetry in the texture. Solid horizontal lines are inherently symmetric so that part is easy. For the diagonal lines, the secret to getting good corner alignment in this example is to place them so that they align exactly with the diagonals of the texture. To illustrate, the texture is shown to the right with with the diagonal lines extended to the corners in white.

To show how much difference one pixel can make, consider the two textures show below at 6 times magnification. The texture on the left is the one used in the examples and the one on the right is almost identical except that everything is offset up by one pixel.

Diagonally aligned		Offset up 1 pixel

And when applied to the same image, here's what we get:

The effect is subtle but if you look closely you can see that the diagonally aligned texture (left) looks sharp at the corners of the frame while the offset one (right) looks a little bit blurred. But the corners match for both so it's hard to say if one is really better or worse than the other. It's often more of a subjective judgement than anything else. The best thing to do is to have fun and experiment until you get the effect that you like.