Making seamless web backgrounds with Vibrant Patterns

Did someone say "web background tiles?" The Vibrant Patterns filter in the Furbo Designer Pack is made for 'em. Play with the knobs and dials to generate an infinite variety of seamlessly repeating patterns. When you create a pattern you like, tweak color and contrast to your heart's content.
          The pattern underlying this page was made with the Mirroring tool, and brought into the web-safe color palette with Web Posterize from the Webmaster series. Web Posterize lets you pour images into the Netscape color cube without dithering – and with plenty of creative process control. Once again, you can freely adjust hue and contrast color and contrast without ever leaving the web-safe color space.
          And since the 216 web-safe colors are part of the Macintosh System Colors CLUT and the Windows color table, creating images with Vibrant Patterns and post-processing with Web Posterize gives you perfect desktop patterns for either platform. An easy way to crank out freebies for the graphically challenged.

The web background at left was fashioned with Photoshop layers and Vibrant Patterns, again using four-way mirroring. First the clown art was created in Illustrator, then rasterized and shrunk in Photoshop, and placed on a 512 pixels square canvas.
          Vibrant Patterns was used on a separate layer to create the rhythmic, repeating background. This was laid beneath the clown, and a glow was added with alpha channels to lift the clown off the background. A new layer was created on top, and filled with a web-safe color.The layers were composited with Overlay, Screen, and Multiply; a flattened copy was then brought into Web Posterize to ensure that all elements stayed in the Netscape color zone. The resulting image was indexed, returned to RGB space, and indexed again to be sure the fewest possible colors were used. It was then shrunk and unsharp masked in two passes to 128 x 128, and exported as a gif.

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