Filling a Background with a Gradient in Visual Studio .NET

Print QR-Code in Visual Studio .NET Filling a Background with a Gradient

A gradient is one or more colors that blend in different shades across the surface of an image While this description may be hard to visualize, the first time you paint with a gradient, you ll know exactly what I mean If not, you ll be required to turn in your Custom Browser Builder s license just kidding! As you may have guessed, painting with a gradient is exactly what you do in this section Just follow these steps: 1 Create a new 784 x 559 image Refer the section Starting a Skin, earlier in this chapter, if you re not sure how 2 Select the Flood Fill tool The Flood Fill tool s settings appear in the toolbar 3 In the Flood Fill tool s attributes, make sure that Match Mode is set to RGB Value 4 Set Tolerance to 0 5 Set Blend Mode to Normal 6 Set Opacity to 100 7 Click the foreground color box in the Materials pane The Material dialog box appears 8 If the Texture option is selected, turn it off 9 Click the Gradient tab to select the page containing gradient attributes The Gradient page appears in the dialog box, as shown in Figure 12-10 10 In the gradient drop-down list, select the Chrome Reflect gradient option, as shown in Figure 12-11 11 Click OK Your selected gradient appears in the foreground color box 12 Place the Flood Fill tool over the blank image and click Paint Shop Pro fills the image with the gradient you selected (see Figure 12-12)

13 Save your work If you ve never saved the image before, the Save As dialog box, shown in Figure 12-13, appears, in which you must give your image a filename and select the image-format type I suggest the jpg image type

You can combine gradients with textures to get some very cool backgrounds Figure 12-14 shows what you get when you combine the Chrome Reflect gradient with the Crumpled Paper 02 texture Yowza!

You may remember that, when you create a new image with Paint Shop Pro, you choose 24-bit color, which allows you over 16 million different colors This color depth is important because many of Paint Shop Pro s special graphical functions require 24-bit color The good new is that, once you ve created your image, you can save it with any color depth you want Paint Shop Pro does the conversion for you, and, although you may see degradation in the resultant image, the conversion usually goes pretty well If it doesn t, resave the file in a different format (In other words, check the resultant image before you close the original!) Avoid saving photographic images in less than 24-bit color, because you ll definitely see the difference then

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Creating a toolbar image Filling the toolbar with color Adding images to the toolbar Changing the rectangle to 3-D

toolbar is a handy place to put frequently used commands where the user can select them with a single button click A toolbar sure beats hunting through the application s menus for a command! A custom browser created with the Browser Construction Kit provides room for all the basic browsing commands your Internet surfer will need to get around the huge domain of the World Wide Web In this chapter, you find out how to create the background image for a toolbar For information on creating toolbar buttons, refer to 15

Like every other image you work with when creating a custom browser theme, the image you use for your toolbar must, for the best results, have a specific set of attributes These attributes include not only the toolbar s size, but also the number of colors and the image s resolution These attributes are complicated by the fact that you can have either a horizontal or vertical toolbar Each has its own requirements The following list summarizes these attributes for a horizontal toolbar image: Width of 784 pixels Height of 42 pixels Resolution of 200 pixels per centimeter Color depth of 16 million colors (24-bit color)