Ulead PhotoImpact - Family frame (Part 1)

Family picture frame (Part 1)

In many houses, you'll a set of family pictures in a frame. They often show pictures from a whole generation from the grand-father to the family baby. The following image shows a typical frame with family souvenir pictures. This is actually very easy to do in PI 5 or 6. All you need is a few pictures ready to use. This tutorial will show you how to create the frame.

All the images above were taken from the PhotoImpact Album accessible through the Switch menu at the top right of the PI screen. Let's start with the frame, this will help in determining the size of the small images later.

Create an new image 540 x 460 pixels.
To help you in aligning the holes, let's set a grid on which PI can snap to. Choose File/Preferences/General.
Select Guidelines and Grid on the left and set the Horizontal and Vertical spacing to 20 then close the dialog box.
At the bottom right of the PI screen you see a button called Unit (beside the mask tool). Click and enable the Grid then enable the Snap to Grid features.

Ok, now that the setup is right, let's draw the outside of the frame then the holes in it. Note that the grid generates a pattern of 27 by 23 squares. There's a reason why the number of squares is odd in both direction. It's so you can easily find the middle one in the frame. Horizontally, it's the 14th one and vertically, it's the 12th one.

Click the Path Drawing Tool and select the Rectangular drawing shape at the left of the toolbar.
In the Color box, choose a nice slightly dark color.
Set the Border to 6 and to Depth to 15.
Draw a rectangle one grid space inside the image.
From the Mode list, choose Continue Draw.

In this section we're going to add five ellipses that will become perforations in the frame. The pictures will be inserted in these holes, behind the frame.

In the Shape box, choose Ellipse.
Draw an ellipse of 8 grid units wide by 9 grid units high. In the following image click in P1 and drag to P2

Now we need to create three more ellipse of the same size and place then symmetrically in the frame.

Once the Ellipse is drawn, select Path Edit Tool.
Click Duplicate in the toolbar. Drag the new shape in the upper right corner of the frame one grid unit inside.
Repeat this procedure for the two ellipses at the bottom of the frame. See how the Grid and Snap to Grid can be helpful?
Now click back on Path Drawing Tool so we can draw the last ellipse.
Draw a smaller ellipse in the middle of the frame. This ellipse should be 7 grid units wide by 5 units high.
Finally, choose 3D Round from the Mode list.

Remember that you can press Crtl+D at any time to create a duplicate of your image. If you can't use enough Undo to go back, you'll still have your previous image to start again.

Now, we need to add texture to the frame. We're going to use one of the bump map supplied by PI but since they are fairly small and will be stretched to fit the image. Before we do this, however, we'll create a larger bump map so that the texture looks nice in our frame.

Choose File/Open and find the file Paper16.jpg in the Paper folder under the PI folder. You can choose any other paper pattern if you want.
Right-click init and choose All. Right-click in the image and choose Copy.
Close the paper image to return to the frame.
Click New and select Active Image as the size for the new image. Click OK.
Fill this image with the paper texture by choosing Edit/Fill. In the Image tab, enable Clipboard and Tile the image.

The tiled pattern looks too 'regular', let's shuffle the pixels a little.

Click Clone Paintbrush and set the Shape to about 30 and Soft Edge to 0 (This is important.)
Hold Shift and click anywhere in the image then pain the image randomly. Do this about 5 or 6 times.
This will make the pattern much less regular. Setting Soft Edge to 0 makes the image crisp.
Save this pattern as a .JPG file in the Paper folder under same name as the original file and add 'Large' to the file name. For instance if you used Paper16 then the file name should be Paper16Large.jpg.
Close the paper image.
Back to the frame. Select it with the Path Drawing Tool and click Material.
In the Bump tab, enable Bump Map and find your PaperXLarge.jpg file.
Set the Density to a value between 20 and 25%then click OK.

Your frame should start to look nice. You can still change its color if you want.

Add light to the frame by choosing Effect/Magic/Light. Click Options and set the Yellow light to white (click on the yellow color). Use these settings:

Naturally choose the settings you like. Click on Preview to see the results. If you want to change the settings use the Continue button until you're happy. Click OK when you like what you see. Be aware that once you applied the Light effect, you cannot change its color using the Path Drawing Tool. You'll need to play with other commands in the Format menu, like with the Hue and Saturation command.

Using the Pick Tool, select the frame. Right-click on the frame and choose Shadow.
Enable the Shadow text box and set the X and Y offset to 2. Set the Soft edge to 15.
Click OK to accept the changes.
I don't know about you, but I like what I see. Save your image as a .UFO file.

In part 2 of this tutorial we'll add the image, a background and a little sign at the bottom of the frame.

[ Part 2 ]