design (spore and twig)*
iMaginator and Create
A great source of material, inspiration, and starting points is free Dover Clip Art. You give Dover an email address and once a week the send you a link to where you can download some low resolution samples of their products. When I get to the sample, I Control-Click on the image and add it to iPhoto.
Both of these botanical images were free downloads. To the right, is what they originally looked like. Both are grayscale images.
I opened the “twig” image in iMaginator and applied the “Mask to Alpha” effect. This removes all black and shades of gray in an image. You are left with only white to transparent in the image. I also used the crop tool to crop out the blank at the top and the writing at the bottom.
I then set iMaginator’s Image Well to PNG in order to preserve the transparency and dragged out a PNG onto a Create document. Every graphics application should have an Image Well.
Next, I opened the “spore” image in iMaginator. I applied three effects. First, I applied the “Color Invert” Blacks become white and vice versa.
The second effect applied was the “Mask to Alpha” Effect. I was left with just the white spore, as the black background was removed. I don’t have an example - it would be hard too see against this background.
Then, I applied the “Colorize” Effect and selected a brilliant red. Lastly, I cropped the image to remove text and from the Image Well dragged out a PNG file to Create document.
On the Create document, I made a brown rectangle and sent it to the back of my document. The twig then appeared as a brown shape in a white box. I duplicated the twig and vertically flipped it, using the Size Tab in the Info Palette.
Finally, it was simply a matter of arraigning my four elements in my composition.
After that, when I wanted to add the image to iWeb, I deselected everything and dragged a JPEG from the Image Well to my iWeb page. There I applied a white Graphical Border Stroke; selecting the rough outline.
Note: You can also apply a Fill to a PNG file in Create. If I had wanted the twigs to have a different color from the brown, I could have a applied a solid, blend or pattern fill from the Effects Tab or dragged straight from the Color Palette or the Library Resources Palette.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Above: Original images
Below: Step one and three of adjusting the spore image. This is after applying the “Color Invert” Effect
Below: Adjusting the spore image. This is after the third step; applying the “Colorize” Effect and cropping the image.