Image Filters

The simplest way to work on a photo is with whole-image filters.  These include:

• Darken - for a sinister mood
• Lighten - a very light image makes a good background
• Sharpen - improves a poorly focused photo
• Blur - for a subtle mood
• Enhance - sharper edges
• Noise - makes the picture look old
• Emboss - looks like an image carved in stone

Even simpler are color changes.  A forest picture is usually too green, and looks better if the intensity of green is reduced.  

Increased contrast can improve photos with lots of similar colors.

Practice:

(1) For each transformation below, figure out which Paint-Shop-Pro filter was used:

Background Image

"Cool" web-sites have background images.  This isn't actually good from a design perspective,
and it is easy to create a horrible background image that makes the text unreadable.

If you decide to use a background image, follow this advice:

• the background should be subtle
• the background should never contain any information, especially not TEXT
• use light colors with dark text, or vice versa
• the background image should have very little contrast - e.g. it is all shades of brown,
  not lots of rainbow colors
• the text must still be readable
• avoid borders - the background should fit together smoothly

The teacher will show you how to create a suitable background picture -
try putting one into a single sell of your table-oriented web-page.