How to Make your Own Super Blade Pro Presets PSP 7 This tutorial was created 2002©Copyright Artwork by EssexGirl please do not copy it, or put it anywhere else without my written permission. For this tutorial I used:- JASC's PSP7 you can get it (30day free trial) Here Super Blade Pro you can get a free demo version Here Sandy Blair's Simple filters you can get Here VM Extravaganza Here some images have been made smaller to shorten file size This tutorial was written by request (hope it's ok Ona). It assumes that are already familiar with PSP's tools and know how to use SuperBladePro with its own presets, and those made by others which are available from many wonderful sites on the web. I want to concentrate here on showing you how to make presets of your own. To make a preset you need 2 .bmp files, one of which is a seamless, greyscale image no larger than 256 x 256 for the texture and the other is a coloured or blank image for the environment this can be any size.

Step 1. We will start with the texture. If you have a seamfree tile that you want to use, you can use that. If it is larger than 256 x 256 resize it (it can be smaller), then go to Edit... Sharpen...and sharpen the image. If it is a coloured image, go to Colours...Greyscale... This is one that I made from a coloured tile You are welcome to use this if you want to. Just right click on it, copy, then paste as a new image in PSP and save as a .bmp file (explained in step 3) If you don't have a suitable image, you can use one of the ones that came with SBP, or you can make one. The following is a nice easy one to make. Open a new image, I have used 200 x 200 black (you can use any size less than 256 x 256). Make the foreground colour of your palette white. On the tool options of your paintbrush click the little brush in the top right corner to select brush types. Click on 'custom' from the drop down list. On the dialogue box click the window or its little arrow. This will open up a dropdown list of the custom brushes that you have. Select one of the brushes. The one that I have used is arrowed, on my list it is number 25. You don't have to use the same one, choose whatever brush you like. I changed my brush size to 60, here again, you don't have to use the same, just try different sizes and brushes until you get an effect that you like. Yours is not going to be exactly the same as mine, but, to give you an idea of what I mean I will show the screenshots of mine at each step.

Step 2. With my brush I drew a random pattern on the image. You can use just white on the black background if you want, or change your paintbrush colour to any grey shades. I added a few more brush strokes in grey and finished with a bit more white. To finish turn it into a seamfree tile. Go to Effects...Plugins... Simple...Quick Tile... (you can use 20/20, or any other tile method if you prefer). This was my result. There are lots of other possibilities. You could use a white background and make your paint colours black and grey, flood fill your background with grey and paint with black and white, or use a normal paintbrush to draw straight or squiggly lines, or even pictures if you want to. You can also use psp's tools such as kaleidoscope on your painted image. To give you an idea of something you could experiment with, for this one I used a white background, drew some squiggly lines and pre-set shapes in black and greys, then applied psp's ripple (Effects..Geometric Effects)

Step 3. Now that you have your greyscale image it must be turned into a .bmp file. Go to File...Save as... in the dialogue box, navigate to the folder that you are going to save your presets in. I keep all the presets that I have downloaded from different sites in seperate folders (named so that I know where they came from) and all of these folders I have put into the Environment and Textures folder of SBP, (you can keep them anywhere you want, this is just the most convenient for me). There is also a folder there for my own presets. When you have found the folder that you made for your presets, give the file a name (make the name individual because you don't want to overwrite any exising ones with the same name). I called mine sg_dandelion. Then click on the 'save as file type' box and in the drop down list choose 'Windows or OS/2 Bitmap(*.bmp)' The image can now be closed

Step 4. Now we need an environment. You can use any coloured picture(black and white are ok too), photo or a cropped selection of a photo. Here again you can make your own image if you want to. Which is what I am going to do next. Open a new white image (I have used 200 x 200 again but you can use any size for this one) I flood filled my image using a linear gradient (foreground + background) foreground colour=#0000C0 and background=#FF4040 with an angle of 45° and no repeats. The same as with the greyscale image you dont have to do the same as me. The screenshots are from my results, but experiment for yourself and see what you come up with. To add a bit more interest I then went to Effects...Plugins...Vm Extravaganza...and applied 'Aura Detector' using the default settings. Save as a .bmp (in the same folder as your texture .bmp), exactly the same way as in step 3 you can close the image.

Step 5. Now we will make a .q5q preset for SuperBladePro (or .q9q if you are using BladePro). Open a new image, the size isn't important, I used 200 x 200 white. Go to Effects...Plugins... Flaming Pear...SuperBladePro... To save on file size I have cropped most of the screenshots and am only showing the sections that I'm talking about. The last preset that you opened will be the one currently on screen (mine was disco ice). We want to use the .bmp files that we just made. As you move the mouse over the present texture .bmp (I have arrowed this in red) it changes to a hand and when you click with the mouse, the hand grasps and a navigation box opens. Navigate to the folder that you put your .bmp files in and open the texture (greyscale) that you just made.

Step 6. Click on the environments box (I have arrowed it in green in the first screenshot in step 5), navigate to your folder again, this time open the environment that you just made. My texture and environment are shown here. At this point you can play around with the sliders, shape button, colour of the lights etc. In this tutorial I am not dealing with their effects. If you want to know more about what they do, I can highly recommend a tutorial written by Sally Beacham at dizteq A great way to make presets is click on the dice and see what random effect SBP comes up with. When I see something that looks good but is not quite what I want, I will try moving some of the settings, eg adjusting size of the texture (the slider on the checkered box just under the texture bmp). This setting has a texture size of 72 Here I moved the texture size down to 46 but left the other settings the same

Step 7. Once you have found something you like, you will want to save it. Click in the button arrowed in this screenshot In the dialogue box, navigate to the folder where you want to save your .q5q presets. You will need to keep the .q5q files that you make in the same folder as as the .bmp files that were used to make them or SBP won't be able to find them when you try to use the preset. Give your preset a name (make the name individual because SBP will overwrite anything in the folder that has the same name).

Step 8. Here I have used the texture .bmp that I made from my tile (in step one), but kept the same environment that we have been using. I clicked the dice button a few times and decided to save this one. Here again I have used the same environment, but this time used one of SBP's own textures, found by clicking the button above the texture window (circled). The variations are endless, you can get many new presets using the same .bmp files and when you get tired of them just make some more.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Thankyou to my great testers To see my other tutorials click Here

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