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.