Scanlines Tutorial

Aleks · **Posted:** Sun Feb 18, 2007 2:13 pm

Hey guys! Long time no see Razz

I've decided to come back to the community, and what a better way to do this than to give you guys a tutorial? It's not my first tutorial, but on this site it is! It is very basic, but very useful at the same time. Hopefully you guys benefit from it. So without further ado, let's begin! Cool

Let's start by creating a new document. Go File > New. Make the document dimensions 3 pixels by 3 pixels. Don't forget to make the background transperant. Leave everything else as it is. You should have the settings below.

Posted Image, might have been reduced in size. Click Image to view fullscreen.

Now, lets zoom as far as we can into this very tiny layer. You can do this by going into View > Zoom, or you can take the shortcut and keep pressing Ctrl++ until you can't zoom in any further. You should now see something like this.

Let's select the pencil tool now.

Now using the all-powerful pencil tool, make your image look something like this. Essentially, all you are doing is making a diagonal line, but since you are zoomed in so much you actually have to click for every one of those squares.

When you have something looking like that, go to Edit > Define Pattern. Name it Pattern 1, if you already haven't and click Ok.

Now let's open up any random picture.

With your new image selected, go to Edit > Fill or use the shortcut Shift + F5. Under the Use: parameter, select Pattern. Now click on the little pattern box and select your pattern. It should be named "Pattern 1", just like you named it before. Now, before you click Ok, you can set the opacity as well. I usually go anywhere from 50% to 100%. The lower the number, the less visible your pattern becomes. So for our sake, we will leave it at 50% all the time.

Now click on Ok. You should have something like this.

And that's all there is to scanlines! Try creating new patterns and playing around with the opacity. Below are some more patterns and what they look like when applied to an image. All the patterns were created with a dimension 5 pixels by 5 pixels, instead of the 3 pixels by 3 pixels that we used above. I also use an opacity of 50% for all of them.