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Grosgrain Ribbon |
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| Download some stuff. You will need a plug-in, Greg's Factory Output Volume II. The download is at the bottom of the page. Extract this to your Plug-Ins directory. You will also need my Grosgrain texture preset. Extract the preset to your Presets directory and the bitmap to your Textures directory. |
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| Create a new image. File-> New, it doesn't need to be large, we'll be creating a seamless tile. Here, I've made it 250x250. |
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Create the ribbon base. Set your foreground and background swatch to the same color. Click on the background swatch to bring up the Material palette and drag the lightness slider up to get a lighter tint of the color. Click on the  Preset Shape tool. Choose the Rectangle preset shape, uncheck Anti-Alias and Retain Style. Set it to Vector and the line Width to about 7. Drag out a rectangle on your image. Switch to the  Object Selector Tool. Grab the nodes at the ends of the ribbon to drag each end slightly off the canvas, you don't want the lines on the ends to show. Selections-> From Vector Object. Selections-> Load/Save Selection-> Save to Alpha Channel. In the layer control palette, right click on the vector layer and choose Convert to Raster Layer. |
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Create the texture. Effects-> Texture Effects-> Texture. Load the amc_GrosgrainRibbon preset. You can make the ribbing finer if you want by dragging the Size% slider down. I'll leave this at 100% here. Ribbon in real life is made of fabric and is never a solid color like what we have. Adjust-> Add/Remove Noise-> Add Noise. Set it to Gaussian and Monochrome. The amount of noise will make the ribbon look like it's made of different materials. I want something that looks like plain fabric and will use 10% noise. If you want something glitter-like or metallic, add more noise. |
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Contour the edges of the ribbon. Selections-> Modify-> Select Selection Borders. Set it to Inside, uncheck Anti-Alias. You'll remember we created the shape with a 7 pixel line, so set the Border Width to 7. Layers-> New Raster Layer. Effects-> 3D Effects-> Cutout. Set the swatch to black, Offsets both to -2, Opacity 100% and Blur to 5. Layers-> New Raster Layer. Run the cutout filter again, this time change the swatch to white and the Offsets to 2. In the Layer Control Palette, adjust the Opacity of these two layers. The amount will depend upon the color of your ribbon. Here, I've set the white layer to 50% and the black layer to 40%. |
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Make the tile seamless. Selections-> Select None. Unless you got pretty lucky with the sizing of the ribbon, it is not going to be seamless. We can check this easily. Click on the layer containing the ribbon, Effects-> Image Effects-> Offset. Check Center and Wrap. Hit the proof button to see it on your image. Not seamless is it? Hit Cancel. Click on the  Crop tool. Window-> Fit to Window to make the image as large as possible without scroll bars appearing. Drag out a crop box, making the left and right edges of the crop go directly through the middle of dark bands on each side. Double click to apply the crop. Proof the Offset filter again to make sure you've got it right, "eyeballing" this stuff is never easy, you may need to go back and crop one pixel off one end or the other. |
See a screen capture of this step. |
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Ready to use in a layout. In the Layer Control Palette, turn off the visibility of the background layer and save the image in .PspImage format to a convenient location. To use the ribbon in a layout, first note the height of the tile, View-> Image Information. Mine is 111 pixels high. If I wanted a ribbon to span an entire page, I'd use the rectangular selection tool to create a new selection on a new layer that starts at one edge, ends at the other and is 111 pixels high. As you drag out a selection, you will be able to see its dimensions in the status bar at the bottom left of the PSP application window. For the sake of this tutorial, I'll make a new image to try it out that is 400 pixels by 300 pixels. Layers-> New Raster Layer. I've created a new selection that is the width of the image and 111 pixels high. Click on the  Flood Fill tool. Click on the Pattern icon below the foreground color swatch. Click on the color swatch to bring up the Material Dialog. Click on the Current Image thumbnail. Currently open images are at the top of the list, scroll to find your ribbon image. Click inside the selection to fill with the ribbon. |
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Add realism. You can close the ribbon tile image, we're done with it. On your layout image, Selections-> Select None. Effects-> Plug-Ins (you may have several menus worth here)-> Greg's Factory Output Vol II-> Pool Shadow. You will have to play with the sliders in this filter, the two most importatnt sliders are probably the last two, Intensity and Lightness. Play around until you find an effect that you like. |
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Add a drop shadow. Effects-> 3D Effects-> Drop Shadow. Checkmark the Shadow on New Layer box and put in setting to your liking. Here I've used Offsets of 1 and Blur of 7. As always, I leave the Opacity at 100% and adjust this in the Layer Control Palette. |
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