Kaleidoscope Crazy

Last night I was feeling kind of restless. I did some bead crochet for a couple hours, but got tired of it, so decided to play. I have Paintshop Pro. Not the newest version, I have version 7. I absolutely love this program because it's fairly easy to use. I'm not what you could call a graphic artist. In fact, most of Paintshop Pro's capabilities are a complete mystery to me. I don't even know what most of the tool names mean. But last night I discovered something really cool and had the most fun with it. Thus the new background image on my blog. The image changed at least a dozen times last night, but I settled on this one cos it was my favorite of all of them. Believe it or not, I started with a pic of a mix of light colored plastic beads that I stole from a bead web site. In it's current form, no one will ever know the what and where of that stolen picture. Heh heh.

Anyway, I thought for today I'd share what I've been playing with. For the example, I'm using the following photograph. This is some gorgeous sock yarn I posted about in March.

From this picture, I cropped a smaller image.




Now the fun begins! This image is 144 pixels wide and 144 pixels long. The size Blog backgrounds like best for tiling.





In Paintshop Pro, if you click on the Effects button on the top you can select various cool gizmo thingies. I chose one of the Reflection effects, then selected Kaleidoscope. I picked 8 petals because I was looking for a squarer look so it would look nice tiled across the screen. Anything more than that and the kaleidoscope takes on a definite circle appearance. The default rotation angle was 90. Everything else said 0. This is what I got. Pretty cool! But I wanted some of that teal you can see in the photo above.


So I changed the rotation angle. Oh what fun that was. This is what I got with a rotation angle of 319. Some teal yarn, some of the darker purple yarn in the center, and a nice chunk of pinky label in the middle.






Under Effects, I then selected Geometric. There's lots of mysterious things under this menu item. This is what I got when I chose Curlicues, with 10 columns and 10 rows, a strength of 15, and symmetric is on. Isn't that pretty?





Then I Twirled it, 180 degrees-also a Geometric effect. It kind of ruined the cute little curls. Not what I'm looking for so I undid it. But a person could have a lot of fun going from this one.






I decided the pattern was a little too light. So under Colors I selected Adjust, then Gamma Correction. All 3 colors were linked and at the same level. This is what I got when I set them to .44. Perfect! Exactly what I had in mind.




But, if you're in the mood for pastel, then move the Gamma to 2.50 and you get this. Pretty neat, huh? I undid it though. I like the darker one better.







Now, just for fun, I did the Kaleidoscope again, same settings as before, and look what I got.

Hard to believe this was a bit of sock yarn.




Now, if I could figure out a way to apply this kind of thing to my needle crafting, wow!

Have a great day!