Easy Plaids Using Posterized Gradients

Requirements: Paint Shop Pro 6 / 7

Basic use of PSP

Note for PSP 6 Users:

The directions and screen shots will be
aimed at PSP 7, but this tutorial can
easily be adapted to PSP 6.

I have seen many interesting tutorials for making plaids. Most require drawing lines or using 3rd party filters. In my quest for finding easy ways of doing things using the native features of PSP 7, I came up with this method. I stumbled onto this idea while following a tutorial by Just Mousing Around - Posterized Gradients.

Open a new image, 100 x 100, 16.7 Million colors, transparent background.

First let's pick a nice gradient.

On your Color Palette, click on the small triangle to bring out the Styles options.

Select Gradient, and the solid color will now become a picture of a gradient.

It is probably not the gradient we want so left click in the box to open the Gradient dialog box.

Click on the drop-down arrow to display the choices of gradients.

For the example here, I have chosen JASC's Summer Field included with PSP.

Set the Style to Linear Gradient, Repeats 1, Angle 0

Using you flood fill tool , fill Layer 1 of the image.

On the menu go to Colors / Posterize

Set Levels at 3 and click OK

You should now have some nicely defined stripes.

In the layer palette, right click on this layer and select duplicate.

Rotate the new layer 90 degrees left or right.
- Image / Rotate - Make sure that the box for All Layers is Unchecked

After rotating our duplicated layer, move the opacity slider to 50.

We could stop here with a very nice plaid tile that will tile seamlessly.

Sample 1 -

Varying the number of repeats will change the look of the plaid.
This tile was made with the same gradient set to 3 repeats.

Sample 2 -

Same gradient, 0 repeats

Other Suggestions:

Try different Posterize settings to vary the sharpness of the stripes.
This one is using a setting of 7.

To have your tiles match your website or graphics project, try making your own custom gradients. You can also convert your layer to gray scale, then increase the color depth to 16 Million and colorize to coordinate with your website or whatever image you are working on. This type of colorization is best accomplished by using PSP 7's Photo Enhancement tools. Manual Color Correction is perfect for customizing.

Here are some examples of this using the blue, white and yellow from my logo:

Notes:
Using odd numbered repeats (1,3,5 etc.) when setting up your linear gradient gives you a pattern that will tile much nicer than using even numbers of repeats.

If you would like to change the direction of the plaid, the easiest way that I know is to use Sandy Blair's Simple Filter - Diamonds.