Quick, do-it-yourself way to make image tile files

Quick, do-it-yourself way to make image tile files

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Here's a question for fellow desktop publishers:
Have you ever found yourself scratching the back of your head
because you don't know what else to do to make your brochure or
leaflet design more eye-catching?

Try using tiles. Tiles are actually image files. They may
contain images of wood surfaces, such as the one you see in the
accompanying illustration; they can contain images of concrete
walls, flower buds, clouds in the skies or anything else you can
imagine. Most paint programs now come with a handsome collection
of tiles, some of which are imaginative creations and some of
which resemble real things so closely that you wonder how people
created them in the first place.

A good image tile file is the one that, when carefully placed
side-by-side with its own copies, merges seamlessly. In other
words, when you put them on a grid, they will form a complete
unity and look as if they were one single image file. It's for
this reason that tiles are good for background, including
background for leaflets.

As a matter of fact, my favorite CorelPHOTO-PAINT! comes with
a tile filter that lets you fill a space with a pre-specified
number of copies. But, this time, I'll share with you a quick and
dirty technique for producing a similar effect.

Needless to say, you'll need a fast PC, a high resolution
display, a lot of RAM and a lot of hard disk space to work with
tile files. For this particular project, I also used the CD ROM
version of CorelPHOTO-PAINT! Plus.

Background

I came across the technique when I was asked, recently, to
design a leaflet for the research center where I work. On the
left of the screen in the accompanying picture you can see the
layout of the leaflet that I had created with Pagemaker 5.0.
Because Pagemaker was not the active program on the screen at the
time I captured it, the wood background appeared coarse.

It was a letter-sized leaflet, 8.5 by 11 square inches. As the
brochure had three panels, each panel was about 3.6667 inches
wide. We need to know the exact dimension of each panel because
each of them will have a separate background file made of tile
files and these files will have to be created in a paint program
and imported into our page layout program.

I chose to create the background file in CorelPHOTO-PAINT!
because I still found this program the easiest to understand and
use. Here are the steps that I took to create the background:
First, I created a new file 3.667 inches wide and 8.5 inches
high. I specified 32-bit CMYK as the color mode, as the printer
which was going to print the leaflet had requested this mode. I
fitted the entire canvas into the screen by pressing F4 or
clicking on View and then Zoom to Fit. You can see the program's
screen on the right of the illustration.

Then I imported one of tile files stored in Disc 2 of
CorelPHOTO-PAINT! Plus. The filename for the wood surface that I
used in the leaflet was CB025089.CPT, and you'll find it in the
sub-directory TILESVISUALS320. If you have this CD-ROM, you'll
find 267 different tile files. In CorelPHOTO-PAINT!'s manual you
can also see thumbnail pictures of all these tiles.

In case you are wondering, CPT is the proprietary TIFF file
format for CorelPHOTO-PAINT! To import the file into the canvas,
I used the command Paste from File, which is found under the menu
item Edit. Remember that you can only use this command for this
purpose. With this command I placed a tile in the bottom left-
hand corner of the canvas, as shown in the picture.

Then I enlarged the tile three times by holding down the Ctrl
key and dragging its top right handle. By holding the Ctrl key,
we ensure that the aspect ratio is maintained and the enlargement
causes minimal loss of image quality. Having done this, I found
that the enlarged tile was still not wide enough to cover the
entire width of the canvas, so I enlarged it further by dragging
its middle right handle to the right until its edge perfectly
covered the right edge of the canvas.

Once the tile completely filled the bottom of the canvas, I
proceeded with the Copy and Paste commands to create the other
tiles necessary to fill the entire canvas. Two things that were
crucial after this stage were that the copies sat perfectly
inside the canvas and that their edges met intimately. In order
to achieve this, I zoomed in 100 percent and used the arrow keys
to nudge the individual tiles left, right, up or down. To make
the job easier, I unchecked the Marquee Visible option found
under the Object menu item. This turned off all the object
marquees, which are not needed at this stage anyway.

Save as TIFF file

Once the 3.667 by 8.5 inch background was ready, without any
boundaries between tiles, I then saved the file in the TIFF
format. In CPT, each of the tiles -- the original and its
identical copies -- are still separate objects that can be
manipulated individually. However, once the file has been saved
in the TIFF format, all the separate objects are merged with the
background so that we have one single layer and thus one object.
In other words, once the file is saved in the TIFF format, it
cannot be edited piecemeal.

Once the TIFF file of the background was ready, all I had to
do was place it on my Pagemaker leaflet. As the original size of
the background file was already very close to the size of the
panels in the leaflet, I hardly had to stretch it to fit my
layout and could therefore prevent further image distortion.

In Pagemaker, it is advisable to choose Gray Out as the option
for displaying graphics on the screen, as it will speed up screen
redrawing tremendously. Only when you want to judge the impact of
your overall leaflet design should you use the High Resolution
option. By the way, you can access these options in Pagemaker's
Preferences dialog box, which you invoke by clicking on
Preferences, found under the File menu item.

One important warning, though: A background TIFF file of 3.667
by 8.5 inches, based on CMYK, can be as large as 11 MB by itself.
The CPT file is usually twice as large. That's why you need
plenty of storage space for this kind of job.

Nevertheless, tiles are something that you can take advantage
of in order to add some spice to your page designs. They're free,
and they can be manipulated in any way you like. So, use them.