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Strips And Bar

A second part to adding something extra to your image, this will show you how to add that little bit more.

To start, create a new image with the dimensions 4x8 pixels (width - 4px x height - 8px) with a transparent background.

Zoom in as far as it will go (1600%) and select the pencil tool. Make the brush size 1 pixel (smallest size). A good colour to use is white but you can use whatever you want. Now on your image draw a strip down the middle of the image, make sure you don't touch the edges, like the example shown below.

Click on edit > define pattern, you will get a dialogue box asking for a name. Give your pattern a meaningful name, such as strip (as I did).

Open your image that you want to give this effect to and then create a new layer, call it 'strips' or something similar (meaningful preferably).

Take the rectangular marquee tool and then make a selection on your page, make the selection like I have done, 4 pixels wide and vertically all the way down.

Click on edit > fill or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+backspace to open up the fill dialogue box, from the drop down list select pattern and then select our previously saved pattern (which hopefully you gave a meaningful name to).

Once you have clicked on OK, press CTRL+D to deselect and you will see that you have a nice patterned strip down your image, but were not going to stop here.

Make a similar selection about 50 pixels away from our first strip, make the selection and fill the screen vertically but this time make it 8 pixels wide.

Follow the previous instructions to add our pattern to this selection, but this time instead of just one line with our patterned strip we will have two.

Nope, were not going to leave it there either, create a new layer and call this one 'bar' or something along those lines. Now make a selection, this one must be inside of each of the sets of strips, like the example.

Go to your original image and select a common colour that is used on that image, red being one of the most common colours in my image, use the eyedropper tool if you wish to select a colour. Fill your still selected bar with your chosen colour.

It's a good tip to move the strips layer over the top over the bar layer at this point.

Now, with the bar layer selected change the fill (layers box) to 50% and the opacity to 70%.

Change the opacity on the strips layer to 80% and now you will see your image looks quite a bit better, by playing with this effect and changing certain things you will be able to add this effect to many images to make them look that little bit better.