What you can do with a little NOISE!

Requirements: Paint Shop Pro 6 / 7

Basic use of PSP

Most people know that Noise makes a great Starfield...
BUT...Noise is actually a great little much-overlooked effect to add to your images, or to use as a base for creating textures for backgrounds, text, etc. Adding a touch of Noise to a plain colored image gives the various textures something to "grab" onto.

Open a new image, any size, 16.7 Million colors. You can use any color you like but lighter colors do show certain effects much nicer. I chose a nice soft gray (#C0C0C0) for this tutorial so that my noise would show up well. Using shades of gray also makes it easier to colorize the tiles.

Okay...let's make some noise!

PSP 7 - Effects/Noise/Add
PSP 6 - Image/Noise/Add

For this example I am using 30%, Random settings.

PSP 6 & 7

Now we will get a little experimental and see what we come up with.

Sample 1 - Hot Wax coating - foreground color set to White (#FFFFFF) and our current background color.

Sample 2 - Sculpture using the Gold Preset. This can later be colorized to give you a nice soft plastered or stucco effect in the color of your choice.

Sample 3 - Noise can be Kaleidoscoped
This can easily be colorized and turned into a seemless tiled background.

Sample 4 - Try some Motion Blur - Angle 45, Intensity 30

PSP 7 only:

Sample 5 - Fine Leather using the More Cracks preset.

Sample 6 - Straw Wall using the default setting for Custom 1 preset.

Sample 7 - Soft Plastic using the default settings for Custom 5 preset.

Using Combinations:

Sample 8 - The same Straw Wall above with Fur Effect.

Sample 9 - Black Pencil and Brush Strokes.

Try applying some Noise to a gradient, then giving it a little Motion Blur and/or Gaussian Blur...

Polished Steel Effect:

Step 1 Linear Gradient

Step 2 Noise 30%

Step 3 Motion Blur

Step 4 Gaussian Blur

These are only a few examples. Experiment! Vary the settings of the standard presets, try combining effects, try different blur types and settings, apply Twirl, Wave and other Geometric effects to your noise...and of course, varying the amount of Noise you use will also yield different results.

Using 3rd party filters opens up even more possibilities!

So the next time you are looking for a certain texture, or want to make a "one of a kind" effect, try "making" a little Noise...you may be amazed at the results!!

Note:
If you want to make seamless background tiles from your "noise" samples, try using Sandy Blair's Simple Filters.
Sometimes when you add a lot of effects, you lose some of the crispness of your design. You can restore this by using sharpen or sharpen more, but you will then need to crop the edges of your square by 1 to 2 pixels before making the tile seamless. Otherwise you will have a line around the image, which will show up on your tile.