Opals Tutorial 101

op-plt.jpg (12499 bytes)

To complete this tutorial, you will need to use Paint Shop Pro. A trial copy can be obtained from the Jasc site.

pearl-bt.jpg (1531 bytes) emb-1-bt.jpg (1504 bytes)

Step 1	Open a new image which is 100 x 100 pixels with a black background.
Step 2	With the selection tool set to ellipse and anti-alias, draw an ellipse which fills most of the frame.
Step 3	Add 100% uniform noise to the ellipse. Do this again to get more.
Step 4	Under Image-Other, go to Mosaic. Set the block width and height to 4.
Step 5	Go to Colors-Adjust and pull up the Hue/Saturation/Lightness adjustment. I left the hue alone and pushed the Saturation and Lightness to +100%. You can play around with this for different effects.
Step 6	Now go to Gaussian Blur under the Image menu with a radius of about 2.0. This may sound strange, but I then did a Sharpen filter.
Step 7	At this point, its time to get a bit more "dimensionality" to the opal. You can do this with the cutout filter. Use a black shadow with opacity around 60 and don't fill with a color. Make the blur around 18 and the offset -3, -3. (Play around with all of this.)
Step 8	Add a new layer, but keep the ellipse selected. In the upper left, spray on a white arc. Turnoff the visibility of the background layer. Use Gaussian blur just on this layer and set the radius to 1.5. Now, reduce the layer opacity to about 40.
Notes	You may want to resize the image down to a smaller size. It might be interesting to flood fill the ellipse with another color before adding the random noise. I also created opals from a white "blank", but got carried away with the embellishments which you see on this page which is why you got black, this time. <G> I'd like to do some more complicated things with shifting the hues.

This is just "Opals 101". I've been doing some interesting things with Blade Pro presets to get opals, but they aren't quite there yet.

emb-1-bt.jpg (1504 bytes) pearl-bt.jpg (1531 bytes)

Any comments are appreciated. Contact me via e-mail.

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This page was last modified on 08/28/98 04:19 PM CDT