Microsoft Paint FTW?

You may have noticed the new header for my blog. Would you believe I created it with Microsoft Paint?

Yep, that's right. The crappy little sketchbook that every Windows user loves to doodle in - Paint. But, with minimal effort I managed to create a pretty classy looking header. I actually did the same thing for the first header, below:


© 2009 Simon Hucko

Here's the original image:


© 2009 Simon Hucko

After cropping down to the shoe, there still wasn't enough space to the right to get a true header feel. No problem, went to Image -> Attributes and changed the width of the image. I then used the eye dropper to pick part of the sky and filled the new space with that blue. I also used the paintbrush with the same color to touch up the noise in the image and get rid of some of the .jpg artifacts around the boot and wires. I then dropped in a text box using the same font as the blog (Trebuchet MS) and picked a darker blue for the text.

NOTE: make sure you save things like this as .png, not .jpg. Otherwise, you end up with compression artifacts, especially around the text. Very annoying

I did pretty much the same process for the current header. Here's the original picture:


© 2009 Simon Hucko

I picked a "white" spot off of the background using the eyedropper. I then evened out the background using the paintbrush to get rid of the falloff and color casts. Image -> Attributes to add width to the image, and a quick fill to even out the background. I used the eyedropper again to select the blue from the highlighter, and created the text. Save as .png. Less than 5 minutes of work, and I can do it from just about anywhere.

True, Photoshop would probably have been easier and certainly more powerful for this sort of thing. But I don't have Photoshop, and Paint worked well enough in a pinch. I'm sure there's an equivalent application for the Mac users, too (and I'll find out this weekend when we finally unbox and setup our new iMac!)

So don't be afraid/ashamed to use the basic tools available to you. It's like the saying goes for cameras: "The best camera is the one you have with you." My version - "The best pixel editor is the free one that came with your computer." Or something like that

~S