PhotoImpact's Texturizer PhotoImpact 7.0 Level: Intermediate Needed Items: A tile of your choice. Description: Learn how to use the Creative painting engine in PhotoImpact to create any kind of texture, apply it to a canvas, and how to make your own texture gallery, and share the gallery with others.

For a long time I have wished for a built in texurizer in PI. While I was playing, I discovered a way to create and apply virtually any texture right in PI. The secret lies in the wonderful Creative painting engine that is included in PI. For this tutorial you need a ready made design. I'm using this one that I made with my Dynamic Designs tut. If you like you may use my tile. Just save this one to your hard drive, and open it in PI. Right click on the tile, and save image as..

For best results, you need a tile with a good deal of contrast between the light and dark areas. If your tile does not already have a enough contrast, use Highlight midtone and shadow under format to increase the contrast. PI 5 and 6 users will find that under Tone Map. Just turn the highlights up to about 16 and the shadows down to about -16. The higher the contrast the more defined your texture will be when done. You may not need that high of a number, but you may need more. My tile then looked like this.

Go to effect/ special/ emboss. For this tile, I decreased the depth to 2, and changed the light direction to the 3 O' Clock direction. You may want to use other options here for your tile. Using this direction made this tile look like the lighter areas were raised, and the contrast lines were engraved, giving the texture the look I wanted.

Go to file/ save as, and save this tile as a windows bmp. Click the down arrow beside save as type and select bmp (windows bitmap). Save the file to a folder you create for your textures. I'm going to show you how to apply the texture without having to load it every time. so you will want the file where it will not be moved. Therefore it is NOT a good idea to save it to the desktop like I usually do LOL.

Now it is time to make a thumbnail for your easy palette. The thumbnail will be small and not show the design very well. So this is what I do to make sure I can easily tell what the texture will be when applied. 1. Open a new square canvas. It can be any size, but 150 X 150 will make an ideal size for this purpose. Choose a solid color for the canvas. This will show in the easy palette. 2. Choose a legible font to write the name of the texture on the canvas. Write the name in large letters across the canvas. Here I used Arial bold font size 30. Remember your thumbnail will be smaller so you need to make sure the words will be large enough to be read. 3. Right click, Merge all.

4. Go to effect/ creative/ painting. (Use the menu commands, NOT the easy palette.) 5. Choose template 42. Click the load button, and find the bmp file you saved before. It is important at this stage to make use of the button to get a good look at your texture. Make sure the texture is not too raised, and is the size you want. If you need to adjust the size, Click continue, and use the controls to adjust the fineness. I've found that 999 for the fineness will display the texture at about full size. Since our thumbnail here is 150 X 150, that will make a seamless tile when applied to a canvas of the same size or a multiple thereof. If you want to use a different size for your canvas, you can experiment with the fineness settings. A fineness setting of 500 would create a texture good for a 75 x 75 tile, and 666 would be good for 100 X 100. It is all in the math.. If you are using the texture on a frame or something that doesn't need to be seamless this part will not be that important for you.

Another important setting in the controls is the opacity. This will determine the level of texture you get on your finished strip or tile. Play around with this setting until it looks raised enough and would still be easy to read text on. Higher numbers here will give more texture and lower numbers less. For this texture, I settled on 300 for the opacity. When your tile looks just right click continue to get back to the creative painting window. Click the button to add the texture to your gallery in your easy palette. Your tile is now ready to use and will be applied to any canvas simply by double clicking the thumbnail. If you find the settings are not right for a certain tile, right click on the thumbnail and click modify properties and apply so the dialog box will open for you to adjust the settings.

This works best on medium colored canvases just like the adobe texturizer does. Almost white and almost black canvases will not texturize as well as the medium colors. Here is a set of textures I created when experimenting with this method. They will import just like presets. The Textures in this set include several florals, my favorite of all time that I made for the adobe texturizer, bricks, crystallize and others. You may Download them if you wish. You can also share your textures with others. To do this you need to export the smp and zip it up together with all the bmp's you used for the textures. With the textures group selected, right click on the name of the gallery in which you saved your textures. Click export. This will create the smp file for your textures. Save it to the folder where you saved your bitmap files. Zip this file along with all your texture bmps to create the zip file to share with others.