BladePro gives graphics a 3-D look by creating beveled edges and surface textures. The effects can be subtle or stark, raised or sunken. There are several kinds of bevels, textures, and mirrorlike reflections, and controls for light, gloss, iridescence, tarnish, glassiness, and more. It’s a timesaving way to make touchable-looking text, web buttons, and special effects.
BladePro is a plug-in filter that works with popular paint programs like Photoshop, Color-It, Enhance, and Fractal Design Painter. This manual assumes that you are familiar with your paint software. In addition, BladePro needs QuickTime to be present on your computer.
You can check for updates at http://ccn.cs.dal.ca/~aa731/blade.html.
What can you do with BladePro?
You can make…
tarnished copper
dirty brass
reflective glass blobs with rainbow caustics
chromed text that reflects its environment
oxidized metal with iridescent colors
rubies, emeralds, and opals
cracked paint
eroded mud
scaly plastic
glittery aluminum
rough stone
your logo embossed into gold foil
…and more. The filter comes with about 100 presets, and this document contains instructions to get you started with original effects.
This manual has these sections:
Installing it
Trying it out
The controls
Five effects you can try
Hints
Version history
How to Register
Installing it
First, make sure your computer has QuickTime installed.
Drop both the BladePro filter and its ‘environments and textures’ folder into your paint program’s Plug-Ins folder.
If you’ve previously used Blade 1.5, take note that the ‘environments and textures’ folder now has to be in the right place in order for presets to work.
If you’re using Color It!…
-Make an alias to the folder than contains your plug-ins.
-Call the alias “Plug-ins”.
-Take this alias out of the “Color It!™ Stuff” folder, and put it into
the same folder as the Color It program itself.
When you launch your paint program, the Filter menu should contain an item called Flaming Pear, and that should lead to a sub-menu containing BladePro.
Trying it out
Start with an image in RGB, greyscale, or any single-channel mode, and select some part of the image with your favorite selection tool. A text-shaped selection with an antialiased edge is good for experimenting.
Choose the BladePro filter. A dialog box something like this will appear:
BladePro needs Photoshop 3.0 or an equivalent to present the image preview. With some other paint programs, the filter will still work, but there will be no preview.
Click OK. The progress bar will appear, and then your original selection will have a new 3-D look.
The controls
Bring the filter back and take a look at the controls. On left are a popup menu and several sliders.
Shape: Choose the shape of the bevel from this popup menu. Choose from straight, curved, up-and-down, and doubled forms.
Bevel
shapes:
Radius: The width, in pixels, of the beveled edge. If this is more than half the width of the widest part of the selection, no area will be left unbeveled.
Height: Larger values here give the bevel a steeper appearance. Positive values cause the selection to rise out of its background, and negative values make it sink in.
Texture: The slider specifies the amount of texturing, if any. Positive values make the texture rise out of the bevel, negative ones make it sink in.
Gloss: Controls the shininess. Zero gives a chalky appearance; higher numbers are glossier.
Glare: Controls the size of the glossy highlight.
Reflection: Controls how much the selection reflects the Environment graphic. If you don’t want any reflection at all, turn this slider down to zero.
Glassiness: Gives the selection a glassy rather than opaque appearance. The color of the original image becomes the color of the glass.
Caustic: For glassy selections, this slider controls the brightness of the caustic highlight that appears opposite the light source. The tiny square just to the right of the slider lets you choose prismatic or white caustics.
Iridescence: Controls the strength of iridescent coloration, and Iri colors controls the choice of colors.
Together, these sliders reproduce the effect that gives soap bubbles their colors: if light is reflected from two surfaces separated by a very thin, transparent layer, interference colors will appear.
Tarnish: puts dull, matte color in the concave parts of the surface. The color-button just to the right of the slider lets you change the tarnish color.
The light angle controls are the two grey spheres. To change the placement of a light, drag the small blue dot to a new position. Best results come from placing the light somewhere in the upper half of the ball.
Nearby are two color-buttons for changing the lights’ colors. If you want to turn a light completely off, set its color to black.
The next column of controls has an assortment of buttons and pictures concerned with texture and reflections.
Texture popup menu: Choose the texture you want. The first item is ‘no texture’; the next eleven items are built-in textures; and the last item is the custom texture.
Texture
types:
You can use any greyscale PICT file as a custom texture. To do this, select the custom texture item from the popup menu, and use the file browser you’ll then see to choose a picture. BladePro will load the picture and use it as a texture.
Below is the texture graphic. Clicking on it is another way you can load a new texture file, and you can reposition the texture by dragging it with the mouse.
Texture files are “height fields” and describe the shape of a surface: black is low, white is high, grey is in between. BladePro comes with several texture files in its ‘environments and textures ’ folder, and you can make your own. They can be as large as 256 by 256 pixels (larger ones will be squeezed to fit) and the right edge should wrap seamlessly around to the left, and the top to the bottom.
(The textures and environments are all PICTs. So that you can tell them apart, the icons for the textures have all been tinted blue.)
Right below the texture graphic is the texture zoom slider, that lets you scale the texture up or down by a factor of 16.
Next is the Environment graphic: When Reflection is on, Blade will produce mirrorlike reflections of the environment graphic. Just click on the graphic and you can load any PICT file as an environment. You can find several samples in the ‘environments and textures’ folder that came with BladePro.
If you don’t want your selection to be reflective, turn the reflection slider down to zero.
Some of the example environments, like ‘gold’, appear to contain their own light source coming from the top left. If that conflicts with your design plan, you can spin the environment with - amazingly enough - the Environment spinner button, so that it better matches the rest of the lighting. This button is the one with the little curly arrow on it.
Next is the Glue Mode popup, which controls how BladePro merges its graphics with the original image. Most of the time you’ll want to use Normal, but other modes can be good for special effects. If you’re an advanced Photoshop user, you can use the Tarnish and Caustic modes to isolate just those components of the image so you can composite them by hand.
Below that, the button with the dice is the Randomizer. Click it and you’ll get random new settings, which is useful for creating new effects.
Next is the Load Preset button. BladePro comes with about a hundred presets, which are prefab settings for making particular effects. To use one, click the Load button, and choose any preset file.
Important: The presets expect their texture and environment files to be in the ‘environments and textures’ folder, and that to be in your Plug-Ins folder. If presets fail to load properly, make sure that this folder is in the right place. The Installing it section of this guide, above, explains it in detail.
Below that is the Save Preset button, which lets you save effects you’ve made.
At the right side of the interface is the preview.
The preview updates automatically whenever you change any setting, but you can turn that off with the “Auto preview” checkbox.
If the selection is too big to fit in the preview square, you can zoom in and out with the preview zoom buttons. When you’re zoomed in, you can drag the preview around with the mouse.
Three more buttons:
OK: Applies the effect to your image.
Cancel: Dismisses the filter, and leaves the image unchanged.
Register: Allows you to type in a registration code.
Five effects you can try
#1: A web button
Suppose you want to make a web button that has the word “Go” on it.
• In your paint program, paint an area in some neutral color. With your text tool, make the word “Go” in green.
• Using your favorite selection tool, with antialiasing turned on, select a a button-shaped area around the word.
• Bring up BladePro. Click the Load button ( it looks like a CD with a blue triangle pointing from it) . Navigate to your ‘environments and textures’ folder and open the preset called ‘button, basic’.
• After the preset loads, the preview should show your button with a basic bevel effect.
• Play with the controls. The Radius control changes the width of the bevel. The Shape, Height, and Texture controls, in particular, let you make the most useful changes.
• Click OK. There’s your button.
• For a more sophisticated effect, make a button as above but without the word “Go”. Instead, make a blank button. Then, in a new layer, make a selection in the shape of the word “Go” and use BladePro to make the word look like gold; use the preset called called ‘gold, basic’. Last, settle the word “Go” on the button by giving it a drop shadow.
#2: A ruby
• Make a selection with some straight sides and fill it with ruby-red. Bring up BladePro and decide how you want your ruby to look.
• Adjust the Shape and Radius and Height to produce a shape with some internal edges in it.
• Rubies are glassy, so set Glassiness to about 90. You want it to appear sparkly and reflective, so set Gloss to about 50, Glare to 50, Reflection to 75. Choose an environment with flattering colors in it: ‘Rum’ is nice.
• To increase sparkle further, turn Caustic up to 60 to produce a highlight away from the light. Even better, use both light sources: move the second one to about the 2 o’clock position, and set its color to creamy-yellow.
• Introduce more variety of color by turning Iridescence to about 15 and putting the Iri Colors slider somewhere in a pink-and-yellow region.
• Subtle texture will make your ruby look best. Click the texture graphic and load the texture file called ‘ripples2’. Set the Texture slider to something between 10 and 30, and experiment with the Texture Zoom until you like the result.
• Click OK. There’s your ruby.
#3: A glassy logo
• Use your text tool to write a word in 50% gray, using a large, husky font - say, Gill Sans Bold at 100 pt.
• Make sure the text is selected, and call up BladePro. Load the ‘rainbow glass’ preset. The word should now appear as glass with a bright rainbow caustic.
• Play with the controls. Try a white caustic, or a different environment, or a different degree of glassiness or reflectivity.
• Click OK if you like the effect.
• If you want to experiment with colored glass, cancel out of the filter, and use your paint tools to paint each letter a different color. Moderately saturated tones at about half of full brightness work best. Then go back into the filter and see how the colored glass looks.
#4: Tarnished metal
• Select a region of your image, and call up BladePro.
• Load the preset called ‘old copper’. The important elements here are 100% reflection of a coppery environment, a wavy texture, some pale green tarnish like corroded copper, and a light source at the upper left, which matches the light in the environment map.
• If the real light and the light in the environment don’t match, the tarnish will look wrong. If you want, try moving the light source and spinning the environment to see how they need to be in sync.
• The tarnish collects in the concave parts of the surface, so it will react to the scale and height of the texture, as well as the crevices in some of the bevel shapes. Try changing those settings and the tarnish amount and color to see the effect.
• Try some other combinations: the environment ‘city’ with black tarnish looks like dirty silver. The ‘dull steel’ environment with brick-red tarnish looks like rust; strange tarnish colors like magenta give a surreal effect.
• Good textures to use with tarnish are ‘scales’, ‘pits’, and ‘crackle’. And try the preset called ‘my tailpipe’ to see a oxidized metal effect that uses tarnish and iridecence together.
#5: Iridescent surfaces
• Select a part of your image, and call up BladePro, and load the preset called ‘ski goggles 1’.
• The selection reflects a nearly colorless environment, but the iridescence adds plenty of color to the result. The Iridescence slider controls the strength of the added color, and the Iri Colors slider decides the range of possible hues.
• The final outcome of colors will react to the shape of the bevel and the strength of the texture, so try changing those settings to get a feel for how the colors change. Basically, the more strongly sloped the surface gets, the wider variety of colors it will have.
• The Iri Colors slider can give a few different effects. At zero, iridescence disappears. At very small values, about 7, surfaces become dull brown, like slightly oxidized metal. At 12, you have an anti-reflective coating. Soap bubbles are about 25, and higher values give the kind of shades you see in ski goggles and sunglasses.
• Adding a very small amount of iridescence can create attractive variation in hue in any effect. Check out the preset ‘my tailpipe’ and change its iridescence settings to see what’s possible.
Hints
Selections with an antialiased edge will yield vastly better results than ones with hard edges. Most paint programs have an option to create an antialiased edge for text-shaped and freehand selections.
The environment and texture graphics can be any PICT file at all, and you can use your paint software to make your own. If your system has QuickTime version 2.5 or later, Blade can read several other graphic file formats too, including regular Photoshop files.
If you want to make your own metal environments, it aids realism to make the bright parts slightly bluer and the dark parts slightly redder than your base hue.
If you want to produce a scene with shiny objects in front of some backdrop, you can use a small (64x64 pixels or so) version of the backdrop as your environment map. This way the shiny objects will match their background. There’s an example of this at
http://ccn.cs.dal.cs/~aa731/bladex1.html .
Constructing a 3-D shape from a selection’s edge results in a slightly ripply surface, so reflections tend to have fine striations in them. For that reason, the best results come from environments with contrasty ramps of color and a bare minimum of detail. Take a look at the included samples to get an idea.
You can use bevels with a small radius and negative height to create a chiseled edge.
BladePro can be used purely as a texture generator; just set Bevel Height to zero, and reduce Radius to the minimum.
You can make your own textures: dark areas are low, bright areas are high. Try this recipe:
Find an interesting piece of a some image.
Use the cloning brush to make a roughly square, roughly homogenous chunk
Gaussian Blur by about 0.5 pixels
Adjust->Auto Levels
Use the highpass filter on it, radius 4 to 8 pixels
Adjust->Auto Levels again
Wrap the edges of the selection to make a seamless tile.
Try inverting the grey values of the whole image. If the picture becomes generally darker, then use the inverted picture. That way, positive settings of the texture slider will produce bumps, and negative settings pits.
When you save a texture map, avoid the JPEG format and use lossless compression instead. Compression artifacts that are unnoticeable when you look at the picture directly become much more apparent when you use the picture as a bump map.
Version history
Version 2.0.8 November 1997
A maintenance release which relieves the nagging “not enough memory” messages which were especially common on 68K computers. Processing speed is slightly faster, and there are new environments and presets.
Version 2.0.1 October 1997
First release as BladePro. Adds several new controls: two colored lights, iridescence, glassiness, caustic highlights, and tarnish. Zoomable, movable custom textures; spinning environments. Adds savable settings files, reduces striations in bevel shapes, and makes the preview zoomable and draggable.
Version 1.5.5 August 1997
Improves compatibility with paint programs other than Photoshop.
Version 1.5.4 August 1997
Removes dark edges on reflective selections. And in the preview, selections now appear correctly de-matted from their backgrounds.
Version 1.5.3 August 1997
Adds new environments, improves reflected image quality, reduces memory requirements, and enhances stability.
Version 1.5 June 1997
Adds metallic reflections and automatic previews. Fixes an image quality problem in one of the bevel shapes. The dialog box now remembers your settings even if you quit and restart Photoshop.
Version 1.4 June 1997
Restores backwards compatiblity with more paint programs, increases speed, and reduces memory requirements. Also minimizes the highlight artifacts which sometimes appear at the cusps of bevels.
Version 1.3 May 1997
Fixes a display problem with the 68K version. The ‘B’ version of the filter restores backwards compatibility with some, but not all, older paint programs.
Version 1.2 May 1997
This version adds previews and two new bevel types. The host program needs to support the Photoshop 3.0 standard.
Version 1.1 April 1997
The first public release.
How to Register
• Besides Photoshop 2.5 or later, this filter also works with Fractal Design Painter, Enhance, and Color It.
• BladePro is shareware. If you would like to continue using it beyond 15 days, you can register it for US$25 in these ways:
- Register online at http://order.kagi.com/?LB , using a credit card.
- Run the Register program that comes with Blade, which you can download through http://ccn.cs.dal.ca/~aa731/blade.html .
- Order by phone with a credit card at +1 (510) 601-5244 during business hours in the Pacific time zone. The phone-order company would charge you an extra US$5 for this.
- Or, you can send a letter to...
Kagi
1442-A Walnut Street #392-LB
Berkeley, California, 94709-1405
USA
... with US$25, saying it’s for Blade, and you will get a registration code in the mail or email.
Payment is accepted through Kagi, a fee processing service. You will get your registration code in under 48 hours by email, or by postcard if you have no email.
If you already own a registered copy of Blade, you can upgrade to BladePro for a reduced price.
What to do with the code when you get it:
- Bring up the filter.
- There should be a button called "Register" near the "Cancel " button. Click the "Register" button.
(If there is no "Register" button, it means somebody has already input the code on this particular computer, and so you're already finished.)
- A new dialog box will appear. Type your code into the proper blank.
- If you are using a BladeUpgrade code, you may also need to type in your old Blade code now.
- Click OK.
- A thank-you message will appear. You're done.
• You can check for new releases of the filter at http://ccn.cs.dal.ca/~aa731/blade.html . And if you have ideas for improvements, or commentary, or questions, please email the author at lloyd@kagi.com.
