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Month: February 2008

Pixel2Life Wallpaper Pack!

Pixel2Life Wallpaper Pack!

Pixel2Life Wallpaper Pack
Just a little something I decided to do today =] Pretty happy with the most of it – not sure about the text, but hey; I can always make edits 😛

DOWNLOAD HERE!

Resolutions Included:

Widescreen: 2560 x 1600
Widescreen: 1920 x 1200
Widescreen: 1680 x 1050
Widescreen: 1440 x 900
Widescreen: 1280 x 800

Standard: 1600 x 1200
Standard: 1400 x 1050
Standard: 1280 x 1024
Standard: 1280 x 960
Standard: 1024 x 768

Other:
Copyright ? 2008 Joshua Allan
Base logo respectively owned by Pixel2life… of course 🙂

Sidebar Category Tree or Drop-Down Menu System?

Sidebar Category Tree or Drop-Down Menu System?

Well now that the latest version of the site has been around for months, I would like to hear your opinions on the new dropdown style category menu vs the collapsing style system we had before. Which did you prefer, why etc… Your comments will affect a future upgrade, so now is your chance to make a difference.

P2L will be making huge changes this year and we will be re-invigorating the site with bigger market push and new features like never before. We'll be working hard on community development and some special reward systems for publishers and more. So in the coming months, I'll really be looking for your comments and ideas for any last minute implementation goodies we can throw in.

Thanks and I look forward to bring you a new and fresh P2L this year 😉

Dan

So who's ready for another contest?

So who's ready for another contest?

Hey guys… I think it's time to start kicking ass and taking names again and we're going to have to put the P2L dev guys to work in the slave mines. To get things started, we're going to have a design contest with some mucho cashola and prizes to be won and I'll be announcing it very soon (this week). But here's a hint… Layout Design! OK that's a bit more specific than a hint I guess, but you get the idea. So you web layout guys might want to sharpen your pencils and clear out some time on your schedules this month.

We will also be looking for a new graphics guru to join the P2L team for some part-time work, but that will all be part of the announcement. DO NOT email or PM me asking to join staff, I will ignore it… it will all make sense very soon I promise. So stay tuned for an announcement by this Friday!

Be good!
Dan

The Color Transparency Tool in Corel Photopaint – Delete specific colors in a single click!

The Color Transparency Tool in Corel Photopaint – Delete specific colors in a single click!

I would like to start introducing you guys to some of the less-used tools in Photopaint, which can be huge time savers if you know how to use them and what they do.  Today I am going to write about the Color Transparency Tool, which is a VERY fast replacement to the tedious chore of using the magic wand tool to isolate specific areas of color to delete them.  You see, with the magic wand tool, you have to click each area of color you want to delete if they are not all connected.  So, let’s pretend you have an image with a black background with a blue line going across it.  To delete the black, you would take your magic wand tool, click on both sides of the image where the black is to mask it, then hit delete.  Now this is very simplified, but imagine a much more complicated scenario.  Well, with the Color Transparency Tool, all you would have to do is click on any area that is black, and *POOF* all the black area in the photo will be removed, all with a single click.

So, let me show you how this works…

Step 1 – First, we need a photo or something we want to edit.  I did a Google search for random images and decided on this cute photo of a Panda cub and his mother:

The Color Transparency Tool only works on objects, so you first need to convert this photo to an object.  You can do so by clicking on Object > Create > From Background and this will turn the photo background in to an object within the object docker.

Step 2 – We’re ready to start 🙂  Just go ahead and click on the Color Transparency Tool or just hit 2 on your keyboard to activate the tool:

You can use the properties bar to see the additional options that come with this tool… you can use these settings to modify how the tool behaves when applied to your image.

The first setting I want to show you and the one you will play with the most is the Tolerance setting.  The lowest tolerance (0) will select only the exact color you clicked on.  The more you increase the tolerance, the greater the range of hues of your base color will be selected.  Let’s go with 0 Tolerance and you will see how it works:

Step 3 – Go ahead and click on a color in the image… I selected this image because I wanted to delete the black colors and replace them with something outlandish!  So, lets click on the black and you will see that only the areas that are the exact color I picked will be removed.

Step 4 – This time, I want to select all the dark black areas in the photo, so I will increase the Tolerance to 8:

And here is the result… notice all black areas throughout the photo are gone just by clicking in one spot:

Step 5 – Now I’m going to show you how you can use this tool to create some interesting effects… bear (no pun intended) in mind that the color is transparent, so you can easily create some fun effects by placing objects under this layer.  As a crude example, I’ll pop a rectangle object under the picture to show you what happens.  First, let’s draw a rectangle the size of our canvas:

Then be sure to place the rectangle object UNDER the photo object in the object docker:

And here’s what you end up with:

And that’s it!  So here you have a quick and easy way to delete specific colors to varying degrees throughout a photo or image all with one click.  Nice little time saver eh?

Thanks and please comment!
Dan