A tutorial, or email me to have wallpapers made
This page is about turning your own photos into good-looking wallpapers for the computer. It can sometimes look quite bad to have your cat's basket obscuring your icons, yet it's always nice to have your own photos rather than someone else's generic wallpaper
This tutorial is about how to get the best of both worlds: a slick, professional background, with your own photos right in there, blending in. I wrote it whilst trying to get a background I liked, without the shoddiness of displaying the wallpaper directly. The border-shape was taken from an 180-degreez image, but you can use any shape just as easily
We're trying to get an image which clearly shows your favourite photo, but has a recognisable small-scale texture, so you can easily see what's your background and what's a window, even if only a small corner of the image is visible
Pick a favourite photo, one of your own or one from the web, as the base for your wallpaper. After all, that's what this is all about; being able to use your own photos...
Just as an example of how this stuff works, I'll just use a random photo from the medieval directory, of Brand and Sir Marcus practising archery.
The secret to success is good tools, and when it comes to software, nothing beats Free Software tools. In the case of photo-editing, the GIMP is the professionals' tool of choice. It's available for Linux, BSD, Mac, and MS-Windows (probably more) and you can download it at zero cost.
Get or draw a neat border around a bit of the screen, then make everything inside the border transparent. Paste your photo into a new layer, then put that layer beneath your border so that it shows through.
You can move the photo around at this stage, so that the most interesting bits are underneath your transparent 'window', or you can even arrange several photos side-by-side
Once of the nice things about Gimp is that you can use it's built-in textures (most are good enough to use as wallpapers on their own), and use the layering functions to mix the patterns with your own pictures.
Here, I've filled in the non-picture areas with a dark grey texture which is easy to recognise as the background. Create a new [transparent] layer, then get a BIG brush*. Select the 'paint with texture' tool, and use it to colour-in everything that's not in your transparent 'window'.
* You can double-click on a brush, and increase it's size a lot to get something big enough to paint on wallpaper
Paint everything outside of your window, up to about half-way across the borders; don't worry about overlapping the borders, we'll sort that out in a minute.
When the texture is applied, when it masks everything except the bit of photo you want showing, go back to the 'layers' window. Pick your texture layer, then put it on top of the photos (so your photos show through), and beneath the border (so the border hides any rough edges in the texture)
As a final touch, you can put a transparent copy of the chosen texture across the whole image. This makes the photos seem like a built-in part of the scene, rather than looking like they're laid on top
Make a new layer, then completely fill it with the texture. Now simply whack up the transparency to 60% or so, depending on how saturated your pictures are, to see the layers below shining through
Small version of the result
Closeup of where the photo meets the background
Click here to download this example wallpaper, or try it yourself with your own photos.
If anybody would like their photos turned into a similar wallpaper, just email me and ask. (warning: charity donation may be required)
Similarly, if you don't understand a word of it, email me to ask questions; this page probably isn't as clear as it ought to be!
