Easy way to make seamless background images for your website using Paint Shop Pro
I’m a big fan of unique background images and I’m not one to use some generic one off of another site. All of my websites have custom made designs by me including the background images. Most of the time I create a pretty simple background because of the painstaking time it takes to make a background tile look seamless on a web page.
Granted, I’m no school educated professional web and graphic designer, however I do pretty well on my own with years of experience designing my own websites and graphics! Everyone talks about Photoshop and sure I’ve used it but I still go with my old faithful Paint Shop Pro!
About a decade ago, I was introduced to the internet and my computer came with a copy of Paint Shop Pro 3 or 4, I can’t remember it’s been so long. At the suggestion of my cousin, I started pursuing web designing with him saying how it’s going to be a big sector in the computer industry. And right he was! I’ve never been one to learn much in an academic setting so I set out to learn it on my own. I didn’t make it through some mini chapter 3 of a web tutorial on html before I started messing with it on my own. I was hooked after learning about tags and managed to bold, italicize, and underline a few words! 
Fast forwarding, everything I’ve ever learned in web designing and graphic designing was self taught through many sleepless nights of trial and error. And I’ve done so much with using Paint Shop Pro that I’ve never progressed to the widely popular Photoshop. I may not have done things the proper way or with the available tools of the program but darn it, I made it work somehow with much perseverance! 
Many versions later, I have stayed with Paint Shop Pro 7 as my preferred choice. I’ve tried later releases of the program but I still like 7 the best.
Having mess with my blog design again tonight, I’ve changed the colors a bit and redid the logo too. I decided to view my blog on the big screen monitor that’s with my desktop computer. I’ve been using my laptop primarily since the computer crash months ago. So I viewed it with another monitor and wow, the background I made really wasn’t as seamless as I had originally thought.
This is a good tip for those who start out designing is to view your site with at least 2 or 3 different browsers and at least one other monitor! You want to make sure that your site is viewable with some of the standard browsers and things are aligned properly. The same holds true for colors and graphics. What looks right on one laptop may look totally darker on another monitor.
On my laptop’s resolution, I was only able to see about an inch of the background on either side of my main blog template and it looked fine! But on a much larger monitor, I had about 3 inches of background viewable on both sides! 
The background was not as seamless as I thought it was.
I decided to fix that and before I started messing with it the old fashion way of trial and error, I had a thought to google a solution. I love the web! I found a bunch of sites showing me exact techniques on how to create a seamless background image tile. And then I found out that instead of doing it myself manually (which is probably the BEST way to learn), there is a plugin you can add to Paint Shop Pro that has filters to convert your background tile you’ve designed into a seamless tile with just a few clicks of your mouse!
Genius! 
I downloaded the plugins and followed the instructions to installing these simple filters plugins for creating seamless background image tiles using Paint Shop Pro! It was soooo very easy and it works great! In a matter of seconds, I took my original background tile I had designed and converted it into several different seamless tiles to use! Now my only problem is deciding which one I want to use as they all look great!
The original tile was swirly and very dramatic looking, active swirls would be a good description for it. Busy, active, agile, fluid…it was very lively! I like it very much but then I had this one tile using the “4 way average” filter that made a very lovely subtle blue pattern from my original. It’s the one I’m currently using (unless I’ve changed it again) which reminds me of wispy clouds. Now I’ve got clouds and stars on the same blog, just like the ceiling murals I create! This tile is quieter, calmer, more thoughtful of a background. I’m all about creating a mood, a feeling for a website so I had a hard time picking which mood I wanted to create here. Ultimately, I chose the more thoughtful one but my blog will still be at times LIVELY! 
Here’s the two background tiles I made, click them to see the actual size of 300×300 pixels. They are both seamless and if you’d like to use them, go ahead! I’d appreciate a link back to my blog at http://blog.jeaneng.com if you do use them for your own website.
So if you want to create cool looking seamless background image tiles, be sure to check out that site above for some awesome plugins! Thanks Sandy! 
