Chris' Graphics Powertips - by Chris Wenham

Magnifying lens trick

Tip applies to Photo>Graphics Pro 2.0

ou'll see in this issue's Photo>Graphics Pro review I had been playing around with the new lens tool to get something that looked similar to what they've been doing over at the newly face-lifted IBM OS/2 Warp Home page. Photo>Graphics makes this dead easy.

First we need to put a hollow circle down on a canvas. From the Power bar make sure you're in Create mode, select the Roller region and the Solid Color tool. Move the mouse over and click once to stick a circle down there. Now flip into Edit mode and make sure the circle is the selected object. You might want to re-size this circle to fit how you want; just grab the corners of the bounding rectangle and start dragging.

Then from the 'Tool' section of the Action bar you'll need to set the color to black. From the 'Region' section, click on the button next to the Region Type and make sure 'Stroke' is checked. The moment you do this you'll notice your circle has grown huge and Photo>Graphics has started rendering again. While you've still got the Path info box open though, set the line width to about 5.5 and the softness to 0.2. You've just finished making the frame (GIF, 23.8k).

IBM's designers have used a slight blue tint in their images, which can be achieved here by layering a solid blue-colored circle in the middle of the lens and giving it a transparency value of about 75% or so. Tip: Create the solid circle by using the roller region again. It lets you pick the center more accurately and the aspect ratio has already been locked for you. If you've drawn cross-hairs already like I have, use the little 'X's to help you line things up when re-sizing. Notice that there's also a 'channel' between the start of the lens effect and its black frame.

Before we stick the lens effect on, we'll also need a highlight to show off the reflection and curve of the glass. You can create this easily by using an Ellipse Fade region with a Solid Fill of white. Make it elongated, then go to the Object Settings of the Action bar and give it an angle of plus-or-minus 45 degrees, depending on which corner of the circle you're going to place it in. Now move it up into that corner and place it somewhere on the edge (GIF, 20.1K) of the transparent blue circle.

Finally, the last step, we create another solid circle with the Lens Tool effect applied. We can do this quickly by selecting the blue transparent circle we've already drawn and duplicating it. Right click on the object and select Object Management.Duplicate Object. Next, go to the Action Bar and change the duplicated object from solid color to the Lens effect and reduce the transparency back down to zero. Voila!

User Tips

Last month you'll notice I had a problem with jagged edges in Photo>Graphics, even though it's supposed to have decent anti-aliasing (and it does, but the effects layered on top spoiled that). If you look at the above final image you'll see that I've pretty much nailed the problem, however there's been more than one solution found.

One reader, Bojan IVANCIC, had this to say:

"I used Ellipse Fade setting fade to 97 or 99 and 'jaggyness' disappeared. The image is also saved with anti-aliasing mark."

The sample he included with the message looksgorgeous. Thanks, Bojan!

Another reader, Michael Widmann, as well as TrueSpectra themselves, suggest placing a blur with a radius of 1 over the top of the image before rendering.

But the best solution I've found, and which I used in the above image, is simply to render the image about 3 or 4 times bigger than the intended size, then reduce it later in a program like Galleria to its proper size. This is forcing Photo>Graphics to squeeze more detail into what will ultimately be the same space.

Chris Wenham is a freelance web designer, writer and Englishman who now lives in Endicott, NY. In the past he has written comedy, sci-fi, Pascal, Rexx, HTML and Gibberish. He has been using OS/2 exclusively for the past 2 years.

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