Photo Templates

[Guest awarner [MVP]]

Here it 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.

Applications 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.

Below are a selection of templates that can be found on the site.

Photo_Templates.rar

Credit midnight