"elorahd" wrote:
I’m trying to figure out how to make a pearly iridescent texture to use as a background for a webpage, but I’m having a hard time getting a blend of subtle white tones and I don’t know how to get it to look shiny and a little iridescent. Any suggestions? Thanks.
To create a regular pattern, start with a new layer of say, 800x600pixels, select white as foreground and black as background color, select the paint bucket and create a small radial fill in the top left corner, about a thumbnail’s size. Duplicate the layer, set it’s mode to "lighten", select the "pearl" you created and go to edit-transform-scale. Displace the pearl to the right, so that some overlap remains with your first pearl. Press enter and (IMPORTANT) immediately go to edit-fade and select "lighten" as the blending mode. Now press CTRL-ALT-Shift-T (Windows) repeatedly, until the top row of the image is filled with pearls. Merge down and duplicate the layer again. Select the top row and proceed as earlier, now creating rows of pearls downwards at each CTRL-ALT-Shift-T step. You should end up with a regular pattern of pearls. Merge down again. Optionally, you can duplicate the layer once more, set it to "lighten" and displace it by one half of the distance of two pearls to the right and down. Merge down again, select "levels" and move the bottom left triangle to the right in order to bring up the darkest grey level as required.
To create an irregular pattern, start as described earlier, but after you pain-bucketed the first pearl, swith the mode of the paint bucket to "lighten" and continue to add pearls in an irregular manner.
Of course you will scale down the final images in either case until the size of the individual pearls suits your needs. If you prefer irregular pearls, it might be helpful to use the pattern maker together with some blur for a fast result after you have created a reasonable initial set of pearls.
Peter
