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Once you get the basic image created, then it's a question of
whether to darken it, or lighten it up.
The darker backgrounds are generally easier to create, and
tend to allow for more detail than the light backgrounds, as well.
The light backgrounds often have to be generally quite faded, that is,
particularly if it's an image, or photo, rather than a more
geometric pattern.
The light range tends to be from average medium gray to white.
Adding some color might tend to help,
and generally you want the background to be a bit fuzzy or blurry,
with rather low contrast, if it doesn't look too bad that way:
e.g. a 1890s and
photo example.
I like to
- lower the contrast first, not too much though,
- then try a slightly higher luminance and color boost,
- then maybe some gamma correction to make it lighter,
- then repeat again, with the lowered contrast, gamma,
until it looks good underneath even fairly small text, and even
tends to draw your eye to the text, rather than the background.
But it's a matter of taste.
And, admittedly, if you want to retain a fair amount of detail, it
might make it difficult to read small, normal text, even
if the image is pretty faded out.
Another method of lightening up the background might be to
modify opacity and then boost color, in PSP 4:
- capture the whole image and modify opacity to 40 or 50,
- cut and paste, probably tending to get something of a monocolor result,
- then try boosting the colors equally, to brighten,
- along with increasing luminance and gamma, as above.
Darker backgrounds, again, are easier to create because they allow
for more detail, even in the shadows.
The idea is still to emphasize the text on top, so that if one
has to edge the gamma a bit darker, then it should be darkened.
As with the light backgrounds, the contrast should be pretty
low - the shadows shouldn't be so much darker than the highlights,
and vis-versa.
So if you have to use the retouch brush to alternately darken or lighten
small areas to help even the whole thing out, then by all means do so.
There's the possibility, as well, that a monitor is not adjusted
to a normal brightness, or is just otherwise 'kinda funky'.
Some kiosk monitors might be very dark, for ex., so that even
bright backgrounds will seem dark, and dark backgrounds
will just pretty much be black.
Whether one tries to allow for these really awful displays is a personal
decision (frankly, I wouldn't).
But if you want a 'kiosk compatible' page, you might have to use either
the very brightest backgrounds,
or else go dark (realizing that the dark background
will fade literally to black on a monitor with such low brightness).
At any rate, as a general rule of thumb, it might not hurt to use
larger text sizes or slightly
higher contrast between text colors and background than you might even ideally prefer.
And it might not hurt, as well, to switch between various screen resolutions
and color depths, if 'just to see' how the page holds up.
As for the programs one might use to do this stuff, in general,
there are, of course, the standard full graphics programs,
like PSP, like Photoshop, like various others, that are used to
produce seamless tiles.
But there are also a few programs designed just for this purpose,
some shareware, but at least three freeware:
One is Reptile, from Sausage Software.
It provides built in animation of shapes as they are transformed,
and can begin with any image, or a random pattern.
Care might be used, though, to make sure the pattern at a particular stage
of animation/transformation is really seamless, and that it doesn't tend
to look like all the other patterns generated by Reptile.
(See also the
animated backgrounds
at this site - generated with Reptile.)
Then there is Harm's Tile, which I highly recommend. It seems to use
many of the same filters as the program mentioned just below, but in a
trimmed down way.
Perhaps that design makes it actually easier to concentrate on just certain
particularly useful filters. I don't know.
I have hundred of backgrounds, bumps and textures either wholely generated
by this program, or just modified by it.
Aside from PSP, itself, this is the program I most tend to use.
I use it constantly. Great program!
Thirdly, there is Texture Maker from Teralogic.
This is really a full on, feature rich program, which runs scripts,
has many, many filters, and like the two above is, free.
It was a come-on for a commercial version, which is now being sold.
You will probably be surprized at how much stuff there is to play with
in this program.
The idea is to mix and match, basically, run an image through some PSP or
Photoshop filters, move over to Harm's, see what more can be done.
Maybe one can then
run it through Reptile
to see what can be found.
Or take a Reptile texture, and try to smooth it, change it, lighten it,
whatever, using PSP.
Or take that texture and
transform it with Harm's.
Wherever the imagination takes you.
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