Petals of
Hope
by Thomas
Kinkaid,
"Painter of Light"
The following is a tutorial of how to make a Lake Applet using the special effects as shown above where only the water is moving. I have gone into GREAT detail in my directions for those of you who do not know much about Paint Shop Pro. I am using PSP 5 and also applied to my web page using Front Page Express through Internet Explorer. If you are using other programs, you will probably have to adjust these accordingly. I also had several codes that I found, but only found one that worked for the web publishing program I used. If you have trouble getting it to materialize, please contact me and I will direct you to several other places where different codes were used. (PLEASE NOTE - I spent several hours testing different ways of doing this procedure and this is the easiest way I have found to achieve this result. I am new to PSP, myself, and therefore, might not know some shortcuts to doing this.)
THIS IS MY PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS IN DOING THIS TYPE OF LAKE APPLET EFFECT: It is much better to make a lake applet where the rippling water effect is below the midway point of your original picture. This is what happens if you don't do this: 1. You will lose part of the bottom of the whole picture. 2. You will have to make adjustments when determining the final size of the pic to put in your lake applet code. And you may have to do this several times to get just the right amount to subtract off the height measurement. 3. The rippling water effect doesn't show up as much in the middle of the picture anyway as it does at the bottom. See pic above. You can also click HERE and you will see that on the 3rd pic there, I started the applet portion of the pic above the halfway mark and and I had to adjust the height in the applet code by subtracting 20 from the original pic size. This can and did get very frustrating. So just remember these things when picking out a pic as to where you will start your lake applet effect in it.
LET'S START!!!!! ....and good luck.
Bring up a picture in Paint Shop Pro.
Click on Edit, Copy, Edit, and Paste as a new image.
Exit the original picture so as not to mess it up.
Make the copied picture the size you want it to be before you start by clicking on Image on the Menu Bar and then on resize. (Or skip this part if you like the size you already have)
When you have the desired size, put your cursor on the pic and look for the dimensions at the bottom right of screen.
Write down the width and the height. (They will be used later in the code.)
Click on Edit, Copy, Edit, and Paste as a new image Then repeat the Edit, and paste as a new image again. (This give you a backup copy)
Minimize the 2nd copy.
You should now have only 1 copy of the picture to work on.
***Click on the selection tool from the Toolbar (6th button down if your have your toolbar on the left edge).FIRST OF TWO METHODS FOR MAKING YOUR NEW SELECTION: Go to the top left corner of your picture. (THE CROSSHAIRS ON THIS TOOL MUST BE EXACTLY AT THE TOP AND LEFT EDGES) Click & hold mouse button down, dragging it down and to the right until you are just above where you want your applet to start and to the far right side of the picture as well. OR SECOND METHOD: You may find it easier to start making your selection mid way down on the pic just above where you want the applet effect on either the right or left edge and then click and hold the mouse button down and dragging it upward to the opposite corner. When you are satisfied with the placement, let go of the mouse button. You will see a moving dotted line around the image you have selected. (My lines are solid purple as the dotted lines would not show up when I tried to copy the pic for the tutorial. This will be the case throughout this whole tutorial) You will notice that the lines are around the upper portion of the pic only.
Click on Edit, Copy, Edit, Past as a new image.
Check to see if the width of the new top image is EXACTLY the same width as the original pic.***
top portion
If it isn't, go to the back up copy of the full sized pic that was minimized and make a new copy of it again & repeat the process again, using the directions between the ***............*** Also exit out the old images, that were not correct, and do NOT save when asked.
Set new CORRECT top portion aside for a minute.
Now click on the full sized picture and the moving lines will appear back on the picture. Click on Selections on the Menu Bar, then on Invert. The moving lines should then move to the bottom section of the picture ONLY . If you still have them at the top also, you did not get the whole top of picture when using the Selection Tool to cut away the top portion and you will have to redo the top again.
Assuming you have done this part correctly and the moving lines are now around only the bottom portion of the picture, you are ready to proceed.
Click back on the top portion, as noted above, of the picture, that you set aside, to make this active, then click on File, Save As, and name accordingly: yourpicname_top, I named mine: sample_top.jpg. Scroll to the .jpg file extention and click on it and then on "save" and save in your homepage folder. You can exit this graphic now.
sample_top.jpg
Instructions continue on next page
