TUTORIAL: C500 Photo Themes

[Guest midnight]

Even though I've only had my C500 a day, you guys know me well enough to know that I'll play around with it and find something cool :P

So here it is.... a tutorial on how to create photo themes/templates.

For this tutorial we'll be using the Bear off Bo Selecta as a template with the face removed so that you can replace with your friends (or enemies) faces.

I used:

Photoshop

Jasc Animation Shop

The Basics:

This works by using an animated gif, The first frame is the actual image, the second frame is the main image mask, and each frame after that is a photo 'hole' mask.

Black is transparent and white is opaque, all levels of grey between act as different transparency values (so if you have a red area and then use a 50% grey mask your photo will appear red).

The Process:

This is the basic picture we'll work from.....

The first thing to do is open photoshop, load up this picture, and change the image size so that its 640 x 480 (you can also use 320 x 240 and 160 x 120 which also allow for zoom) then create a new layer and whiten out the area we want to mask using the drawing tools. The reason I chose white is that its easier to see where you are up to when creating the mask. You can use soft and hard edges as the mask is in greyscale allowing for smooth edges. So the edge around the glasses is pretty clean edged, but where the face meets the fur i've made it slightly blurry. As you can see, I've also added a shadow under the glasses frame to make it more three dimensional.

This image should now look like this...

So that the shadow works correctly, we now need to blacken out the face of the original picture.

The easiest way of doing this is to duplicate the white mask layer, and then change it to black with image>adjustments>Hue/Saturation and then drag the lightness slider all the way to the left. You can now merge this layer with the main bear image and save this as 'bear1.jpg'.

The next thing to do is to create your image mask. Go back to the white layer mask, and create a layer under this and fill it black. And merge these two layers.

Now invert the image with image>adjustments>invert (remember, black is transparent, white is opaque).

Weird bug: One thing i have noticed is that if the black is #000000 then it isnt transparent (yeh, seems a bit dumb dont it), anyhoo, a solution i found is to lighten the image slightly, so go back to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation and lighten the image by about 5-10%. This should fix this problem.

And save this as 'bear2.jpg'

Because the mask for the main image and the mask for the photo 'hole' are the same we can use this image for both. We could at this point create more masks for more photo 'holes'. But for the sake of this tutorial only one is needed (if people request more info about multiple 'holes' i'll make a new tutorial, but the principals are the same, just remember to include all 'holes' in the main image mask).

Next, Load up Jasc Animation Shop.

And open both of the files (bear1.jpg and bear2.jpg). now drag bear2.jpg into the second frame of bear1.jpg. Then duplicate this second frame and we should now have 3 frames, the bear with face blackened out, and two black and white masks.

Now all we have to do is save it, File>Save As, and call it something like Bear.gif. A window will now appear with a slider, make sure that its the highest quality, and now you have to turn off all the optimisations by clicking on the Customise button, and turn all the options off (this prevents it from removing duplicate frames).

And now just agree to all the other pages so that the image is saved.

Now its simply a question of copying this file to the phone by placing in either Storage/My Documents/Frames or, on the storage card... Storage Card/My Documents/Frames.

In the camera app you can turn on the templates by selecting Menu>Capture Mode>Picture Theme and you can select your theme by pressing left and right on the joypad, or by pressing Menu>Select Template. If you want to change the location of the template select Menu>Options>Photo and change the Template Folder between Internal Memory and Storage Card.

And thats all there is to it. I've attached this template below for those who need it :)

bear.zip

[Guest meatgrinder]

ahahahahahhaha, wicked midnight!

cant wait to see what other modaco'ers make :)

Dave

[Guest meatgrinder]

BUMP^^^ - doesnt any1 appreciate this?!

Dave

[Guest midnight]

guess not m8 :P

oh well, i'm having fun with it :)

[Guest peekie]

thats the whole fun bit of smartphones having fun :wink: :wink: :wink:

[Guest Vector]

i appreciate it! :)

once upon a time there was a bear....

hehehe ;p

[Guest blueflash]

nice one, cheers. i hadn't even noticed that option on the phone

[Guest mavisdavis]

Nice work Midnight. Not getting a C500 for a while if at all (waiting for the Feeler 8-[ )but its fun to have a dabble :wink:

[Guest phAn]

I've been trying to get something simple to work, but I just can't figure it out. I've been trying for hours now and I just don't seem to get the bug :S Problem is my supposed-to-be-solid background is transparent... and I can't figure out why :/

Can someone explain to me why this doesn't work and what I need to do to fix it? I've tried about everything, it's driving me nuts :S

work.zip

[Guest Skunkchild]

I think your problem may be that thew white mask is actually #FEFEFE and not #FFFFFF. Try changing the colour to true white and see if it works.

[Guest Vegaskid]

Of course, animated GIFS!! I wondered how it worked. Great stuff...only problem for me is, although I have Photoshop, I'm poo at it and could do with a real 'for divvies' guide!

Anybody know of a place where you can get more of these photo themes?

[Guest Will]

see the examples thread for some basic one :)

[Guest bigdan]

Will, could you post a link to where I can find these examples please?

Thanks

[Guest Alfa155]

I found these's ,Hope they help :wink:

http://smartphone.modaco.com/viewtopic.php...t=gifs+examples

........alfa 155.......

[Guest bigdan]

Thanks Alfa.

:lol:

[Guest damednuh]

Sorry, but im new to this forum and I dont get where the templates are??

How do you download the gif's for example? It goes for all attached files in this forum??

Thanks

[Guest awarner [MVP]]

The templates are in the previous posts, you have to be logged in to view them but there have been a

few reports of a site glitch that means you have to refresh the page a few times before the image appears.

[Guest damednuh]

ok thanks. I ws logged in, but I can report another bug. I havent thorougly investigated it, but it seems that the site isnt firefox friendly (I use firefox) and when I switched to IE it worked nice.

Dont know if it a security setting I have that wont allow true login. maybe its a cookie thing.

Thanks for the quick reply

[Guest evilboy]

this is great!

[Guest bartsimp]

is there an area (site or thread) where I can find photo themes? It seems there is a thread here but it doesn't include anything. Thanks

[Guest the-jackal]

This all looks cool but. When i first got my phone and i was playing around i discovered these frames and took some nice pics of my daughter using the cat one. Trouble is now i cant work out how to use them. all i get is a default theme of some egyptian theme. can anyone help. I want my cats back. :cry:

[Guest kiddybaggie]

see link to thread on previous page.(1) It should help you. :lol:

[Guest the-jackal]

Thanks. I think i worked it out. Cos i store my pictures to my SD card it automaticly creates a frames folder in My Documents. I simply transfered the gifs into this folder and hey presto it worked. Now for some creations. Thanks for ya help.

[Guest Mehka]

Is it possible to like add a warping or a blurring effect to the "transparant" partion?

[Guest cristaleyes88]

I need your help I accidentally deleted my photo themes and now all I have is the stupid egyptian theme.Can someone email them at [email protected] ? Please I'm begging you I feel like dying I'm so stupid :cry: