Create eye-popping wallpaper with CorelPHOTO-PAINT! 6.0

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Are you tired of staring at the bluish-green Windows 95 desktop background day after day? I bet you are.

In the past, Windows experts would recommend against pasting wallpaper on your desktop. The reason for having a plain backdrop was your PC had to work hard to paint the bitmap picture across your screen, and your system would load faster if you left it blank.

Today the situation is different as more and more PCs have graphics cards incorporating a Windows accelerator chip so that drawing a full-screen bitmap picture will no longer be a challenge to your PC. Frankly, I have not noticed any more delay in booting up with wallpaper than booting up without.

Desktop wallpaper is a bitmap file in the .BMP format that you can paste on the Windows desktop area. Branded computer makers usually put their logos in the wallpaper to give it a distinct identity.

If you run Windows 95, you could install MS Plus, which will give you several desktop wallpapers to choose from as part of their Desktop Themes. You will find out soon enough, however, that these bitmap files will not give your PC a distinct personality, as so many other PC users have the same picture of a cougar on their screens.

One thing you can do is scan your own picture with a scanner and save it in the .BMP format. Although this would make your PC fairly personal, you may soon get tired of being greeted by your own picture everytime your PC boots up.

If you happen to have CorelDRAW! 6.0, however, you can create your own wallpaper, and I guarantee that the wallpaper you create with the help of this graphics program will make jaws drop and mouths water -- especially if your system can display 65 thousand colors or more.

Fractals

Take a look at the accompanying picture, and you will see a sample of desktop wallpaper I created with HCS's Julia Set Explorer 2.0. This utility is a bundled program in CorelPHOTO- PAINT!, commonly called a plug-in.

What this plug-in does is let you explore various fractal- generated texture fills. Fractal geometry is a branch of mathematics that deals with irregular patterns made of parts of things that, in some ways, still resemble the whole. Looking at lizard skin, for instance, gives a good example of fractal geometry. The patterns look irregular, yet the parts still bear some similarity to each other. Fractal geometry, which is closely related in its complexity and chaos to work by Benoit Mandlebrot, has been applied to various other fields such as to the stock market and industrial chemistry. With CorelDRAW! and CorelPHOTO- PAINT! we apply fractal geometry to computer graphics. In both programs, we create an object, then fill it with fractal textures.

Julia Set Explorer comes with more than three hundred preset fractal textures. Since we can change parameters, and apply different color palettes to the patterns, we can create millions of variations. This utility is so interesting to explore it would be a shame to leave it untouched if you have CorelDRAW!.

Steps

To create your own picturesque desktop wallpaper, first load CorelPHOTO-PAINT! and create a new file. The program will ask you to define the properties of the new file. Set the color mode to 24 bit, choose Pixel as the unit of measurement for width and height, specify the exact dimension of the bitmap image according to the size of your display screen, and then choose 200 as the image resolution. My SVGA display screen is set to 1024 by 768, and these are the figures I entered for each of my wallpapers. Depending on your own screen resolution, you should specify 640 by 480, 800 by 600, 1024 by 768, 1280 by 1024, or even 1600 by 1200.

Corel recommends limiting the pixel resolution to 200 when you work in 24 or 32-bit color mode. Actually, for this purpose, the resolution of 72 DPI will be sufficient as you are only displaying the bitmap on the screen. The higher the resolution we set, the bigger the file will be.

Then you click OK. When the new file window appears, you need to specify the area you want to fill with your image. To do this, click on Mask -- found on the menu bar -- and click on All so that the entire screen will be selected.

Now comes the fun part: You click on Effects, then Render, and then Julia Set Explorer 2.0. and a different user interface will load. You might be intimidated at first by the interface, with its buttons that light up when you place the cursor on them, but do not worry, you will like it when you know it better.

Explorer

Julia Set Explorer is a product of HSC, which has given us great graphics tools like as Kai Power Tools and Kai... In Julia Set Explorer, the center section is the realtime preview window which displays the resulting texture fill. You can start your adventure by clicking on the Preset button, and explore literally hundreds of texture fills.

The names given to each of the presets tell you how exotic the fills will look. Just imagine what the texture fills, 'Nuclear meltdown', 'Lava Plume', or 'Imploding Universe' will look like!

When you find a preset that you like, you can explore the possibilities of changing its colors. My favorite preset is 'Totally Tubular', to which I added the 'Metallic Gentle Gold' gradient fill. The result of this combination is the wallpaper you see in the accompanying picture.

As well as changing the gradient color palettes, you can also pan the fractal texture around, and zoom in or out. To pan it around in the preview window, you have to hold down the Ctrl key. To Zoom out, you press the Alt key. When you find a texture fill that you really like, click on OK.

The fractal algorithm may take about fifteen seconds to draw the texture on your file window. When it is done, you can add a personal touch by placing your name or your company name on it. To add your name use CorelPHOTO-PAINT!'s Text tool. You can change the color of the text by using the program's Fill tool.

When you are happy with the result, you should save the file in the C:WINDOWS subdirectory. Do not forget to specify the .BMP format, though.

To paste your newly created wallpaper on the desktop, click anywhere with the right mouse button and select Properties from the popped-up menu. On the right side of the dialog box that will appear, select the name of the file that contains the fractal texture fill. Click on the Apply button, and you are now ready to show off your desktop.