Motivation: Filling text with images in Paint Shop Pro.
Feature: Paint Shop Pro 8 or Paint Shop Pro 9

One of the most desirable text effects is to fill the letters of a text block with an image and then to apply special effects/styling to that text. This tutorial will show the first of two ways of doing that using Paint Shop Pro.

The image to the left shows our final finished product. the image is from theFall in the North Bay area of Northern Ontario. The Fall colours were in full brilliance but the day was intermittently overcast and cloudy. So the Across the lake colors are just hinted at. So using a pattern fill based on an image taken just a few brighter minutes before, we would add a caption that would suggest true colours to be found in the countryside.

So the first task is to find out how we can get pictures into type. Here is the shortcut. Patterns are available as fills - and user images can be defined as patterns. So the sequence is identify a picture you want to be used as a fiill pattern. Prepare it to be a pattern. And then add it to the patterns available for fill. Then fill away.

Here is the picture we want to use for our fill pattern. But only the upper right portion and then we would like to make it work as a seamless pattern when it is tiled.

So the Crop tool is used to select the right corner. Then to the cropped image apply the Effects | Image Effects | Seamless Tiling command. This command is very settings sensitive so be sure to turn on the Show Tiling Preview option - and use the Bidirectional setting for Direction. After that it is a matter of taste and tinkering in the Seamless Tiling dialog. I find the extra effort of getting the tiling working well in both directions is well worth the time. Also you may have to step back and enlargen or crop the base image to allow the Tiling more room to smooth the transition. Finally don't be shy about throwing in the towel - good tiling most often pops out at you with 2-3 adjustments.

Here is our selected tiling image - the one on the extreme left. To turn it into a pattern is easy, just save it to the Jasc patterns directory. The directory will be close to the following:
C:\Program Files\Jasc Software Inc\Paint Shop Pro 9\Patterns\Photos.
Now there is another way to create a pattern but it involves 3 steps. First, make the materials palette visible. Next, click on foreground colors fill icon and a drop down set of icons will appear as in the screenshot above of the Materials palette. Choose/click on the Patterns icon (that is the black circle icon with a grid or pattern in it). The last default pattern will now fil the Foreground color swatch. Click on it and the Materials Property dialog as shown below wil popup.
So now we are nearly done (maybe saving the file to the patterns directory is easier after all). Click on the Add to Swatches button in the bottom right corner of the dialog and a popup will appear asking for a Swatch name. Name the swatch something memorable - say FallBackPattern. Click OK.

Now you would think that PaintShop Pro would be smart and load up the newly created pattern/swatch right away. Nope. You have to do it. Go to the pattern thumbnail at the top left, click on the tiny black down arrow triangle and watch as whole array of patterns pops up.Our newly created one is at the top of the list. Choose it by clicking on it and then the dialog will will show the newly created pattern.

Now you would think that PaintShop Pro would show a preview of what the new pattern is going to look like. There is plenty of blank space in the dialog box. Nope. Even when you change the Angle and Scale settings for the pattern (just to the right of the pattern thumbnail in the screenshot), the preview only appears in the little thumbnail view - and that is not rendered to scale. So you wont get a true idea of how the pattern will look until you actually paint or fill with the pattern.

But hey, this party is pleased as punch at having one of his own images adopted as a pattern. So I am really not complaining.

The rest of the story is fall off a log easy. When writing the title "North Country" we chose our patter as forground color or equivalently stroke fill. Yes, a pattern can be used as a stroke color for text. We insured that the Stroke width option of the text tool was suitably enlarged - and hence the colorful border to our "North Country" text as shown in the screenshot at the topof this page. We just switched colors using the Material Palette's Swap Colors icon in the top right corner to make our underlining rectangle have the colorful pattern as fill. We used the Vector drawing tool to create the

The key points to remember in this tutorial are 1)that there are often two or more ways to arrive at an end in PaintShop Pro - and 2)patterns are a very powerful way to add images on top of your base image through text, vector shapes and just straight-forward paint brush strokes. Very powerful and very useful idea.

(c)JBSurveyer