Will the program create a background image for a webpage?

arthurghewett · January 27, 2008, 08:32:05 PM

Can a background for an entire webpage be created?
Thanks
Arthur

Mr_Lamppost · January 27, 2008, 08:48:38 PM

I'm not 100% sure what you are after here but the licensed (Paid for), version can create images that should be large enough. I am not sure what the upper limit on image size is other than render time

bigben · January 28, 2008, 02:53:25 AM

Web pages are at the bottom end of the image resolution scale, so yes, it can ... but if your designing for a large screen you'll need a large image which will add a lot to the page's download size, or compress the crap out of it which will make it look awful. You might consider a banner or border image.

arthurghewett · January 28, 2008, 06:32:29 AM

http://www.bostonairinc.com/id2.htm
A website that I enlarged the picture (jpg) to fit a whole web page.
It seems there is more reasons not to do this. However it would be nice if we had that option as there are a lot of pictures out there that could be backgrounds and I think Webpages could be enhanced by this option, some anyway.

Arthur H

bigben · January 28, 2008, 08:08:02 AM

Resizing an image up isn't too bad as long as it doesn't become too pixelated. A high res super sharp image isn't necessarily a good thing because it can then be too prominent and you can't place any text over it without it becoming illegible.

You're probably better off not repeating the background image as it looks a bit silly on high res monitors.. maybe fading the edges of the image to the background colour..

Mr_Lamppost · January 28, 2008, 04:36:23 PM

I agree with bigben re file size and visibility of text etc. Even at 1280 by 1024 the image on your example page shows the edges of repeats when viewed full screen. This looks rubbish

I usually use the fade to background colour trick with a non repeating image. If you want the image to form the border of a fixed size area you can use an image of the same resolution as the fixed area and save on the file size by replacing the central area with a single colour.

Remember that the Free version of TG2 is limited to 800 x 600.

arthurghewett · January 28, 2008, 05:24:43 PM

Looks like we are back again to the original question which if someone views with a resolution setting of 1280 by 1024 or greater then there will be the problem. Is the answer use a tile image or resolution less than the 1280 by 1024?

What would be the percent of pc's that use 1280 by 1024 or greater?

Magazines or such can do a small picture then show the same picture at a full page. PC's cannot do that?

Thanks
Arthur

neuspadrin · January 29, 2008, 10:33:26 AM

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp <-- current common stats of computer browsers

The problem with setting a picture at higher resolutions and looking nice is that download time increases. With websites its usually best to have a small picture that can tile certain ways and not look tiled. Like this forum, the background is a simple gradient image (my guess without bothering to look at the code) that is set to stay at the top, and the background color is the light blue near the bottom and they created a gradient that goes from dark blue to light blue on their image and set it to tile across the x axis.

With magazines, they show small and big pictures because they started with the higher resolution.. probably a very high resolution. The thing with resolution is that if you make it small and then attempt to stretch it upwards, it looks quite bad. The only way to change resolution without loosing any quality is to make take a higher resolution and make it smaller.

Personally I'd suggest switching to a gradient like this site for the background, and using terragen to make a nice banner at the top.

mr-miley · January 29, 2008, 10:45:25 AM

I run 2 monitors, both at 1280 x 1024....

Magazines (or any press printed output for that matter) can do this mainly because you have it the wrong way round. They show the picture at full page, and then SHRINK it for the smaller picture. If it is a photo or illustration, it will be produced larger than needed for the full page image, then shrunk a little to fit the full page, then shrunk further to fit the small image. I am an Illustrator by training, and we ALWAYS worked "for reduction". Eg. the illustration was produced at least 10-15% larger than the printable area. When shrunk, it makes the illustration (or photo) look "tighter". This isn't always the case for computer generated work, because you have to take dpi resolution into account. An 800mm x 600mm 300dpi pc generated image will show on a a web page at approx. 3333mm x 2499mm because most browsers show all images at native screen resolution (eg 72dpi, some 96dpi). A photo or illustration for print would be scanned at the resolution that it was going to be printed at (between 200 - 300 dpi) so there is no issue with resizing.

Did any of that make sense

Ta

Miles (in the words of Mr DP Gumby.. "Brain Hurts...Brain Hurts"

)

arthurghewett · January 29, 2008, 08:23:55 PM

It seems that creating a background for a web page and not showing the "Tile" repeat aspect I am limited to strictly a color.
The Gradient color shown on this page, will Terragen do that?

http://www.arthurhewett.info/ I tiled vertically & get this.

I want to take a course (LVA) but my goal is to achieve a full webpage background especially for high resolution 1200 up.
Is there another course available to assist me in the goal?
Thanks
Arthur

Will · January 29, 2008, 08:33:55 PM

Couldn't you just make a gradient's in GIMP or PS? Sorry I could be missing the entire idea of the question.

neuspadrin · January 30, 2008, 12:54:54 PM

when using background images its usually best to use CSS to place them instead of putting it in the body tag.

like for this site
here is the background image: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/Themes/Planetside/images/bg_body.gif
a simple small strip gradient that goes down. you could then easily place that with some css

body {
background: url(image/location.jpg) #final_color_in_gradient repeat-x;
}

and it would definitely be easier to use photoshop (or gimp) to create this gradient. Then if you really want to use terragen on your site you can set that as a banner (a smaller image than an entire background) at the top or something.

also its good to avoid using images as backgrounds because it causes the page to look cluttered and a mess and can distract the user. the background is good whitespace(any simple colors/gradients) to let the eye relax.

arthurghewett · January 30, 2008, 07:23:41 PM

I don't have PS or GIMP.
What I do have is PSP X2 and PhotoImpact.
I created this black gradient with PSPX2, ( for some reason it would not let me do color), http://www.arthurhewett.info/
but you can see what I ended up with.
Even using Photoimpact the color gradiant I still ended up with these tiles.
Arthur

rcallicotte · January 31, 2008, 08:41:27 AM

@arthur - have you tried Paint.Net? It's free / donation-basis.

Virex · January 31, 2008, 09:06:40 AM

Gimp's Free to download (it's open source). It will enable you to create the kind of gradient you're looking for, but it'll take some practice.

Other then that, you could try haking it in your site's code. I'm not an expert when it comes to this, but what I would try is to for every point drawn, calculate the nearest point on the image itself, get that points colour, calculate a gradient from that colour to the desired edge colour and use the distance to that point to pick the right colour in the gradient.