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. You can use any greyscale BMP 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. 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 BMP 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.

texture popup texture graphic texture zoom environment graphic with spinner button

Dice This randomizes the settings. Click it as much as you want to see different effects. Glue mode: Lets you combine the sun with the underlying image in various ways. Modes other than "normal" produce special effects. "Composite" is useful: it makes the sun opaque, and everything else brightens the underlying image. Plus % and minus buttons: If the selected image area is larger than the preview are, these buttons will let you zoom in and out . You can also reposition the preview by dragging it around; your cursor will turn into a hand. Auto Preview: When this box is checked, the preview automatically updates whenever you move any control. Turn it off if you want to save time. Load preset: BladePro comes with some presets, which are files containing settings. To load one, click this button and browse for a preset file. Save preset: When you make an effect you like, click this button to save the settings in a file.  Important: The presets expect their texture and environment files to be in the 'environments and textures' folder. If presets fail to load properly, BladePro will ask you where that folder is. The Installing it section of this guide, above, explains in more detail. 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.

dice    glue mode   Load preset (top) and save preset

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 how they interact. 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', 'crackle', and 'dimples'. And try the preset called 'my tailpipe' to see a oxidized metal effect that uses tarnish and iridescence 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 produces assorted 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 hues 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.

Converting presets between Mac and Windows BladePro for Macintosh can use presets and textures created for use with the Windows version. Just drag-and-drop .q9q and .bmp files onto the "BladePro Converter" app. It's on the CD and you can find it here too.   BladePro for Windows can use preset files created by BladePro for Macintosh. Just follow these steps: 1. Add the suffix ".q9q" to the preset file's name. 2. Identify the texture and environment files used by the preset. Use your paint software to convert them to ".bmp" format, and put them in your "environments and textures" folder on your Windows machine.

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. If you find that the textures look grainy, try setting your monitor to 24-bit (millions of colors) mode rather than 16-bit (thousands of colors) mode. The environment and texture graphics can be any BMP file at all, and you can use your paint software to make your own. Included with BladePro are... Twenty-two environments 2am bronze sunset cheap gold city copper Curacao driftwood dull steel glitter gold hillside island la-la land puffy red copper road rum sea & sky tinsel watery white chrome winter Eighteen textures burrs cow crackle crumples dendrites dimples fibrous grass lumps pits plaster ringlets ripples2 ruffles scales silk tumor turbulence   Several Extra Texture Packs are available for free - check http://www.flamingpear.com/textures.html . 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://www.flamingpear.com/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. Try this using the texture 'dimples' and some tarnish. 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.

Version History Version 2.1.4 June 1999 Improves compatibility with non-Adobe paint programs.   Version 2.1.2 January 1999 Improves the smoothness control. When smoothness is set to 0, the result is the same kind of smoothing found in version 2.095.   Version 2.1 December 1998 Adds a smoothness control and displays the name of the current preset file.   Version 2.0.8v November 1998 Fixes one cause of a crash that occurs when BladePro is run under Windows98 in combination with non-Adobe paint programs and certain printer drivers. Also improves the appearance of magnified textures.   Version 2.0.8u November 1998 Fixes incorrect bevel shape at the bottom of selection.   Version 2.0.8t November 1998 Dispels "Filter requested invalid data" messages from Corel Photopaint.   Version 2.0.8s October 1998 Improves stability.   Version 2.0.8m May 1998 Improves stability.   Version 2.0.8j April 1998 Fixes strange settings which appear the very first time BladePro is run.   Version 2.0.8i April 1998 Fixed incorrect colors that occured when using the filter in a layer.   Version 2.0.8h March 1998 Improves compatibility with Photoshop 3.0.   Version 2.0.8f March 1998 The first public release of BladePro for Windows.   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.

How to Register What to do with the registration code included in your purchase: - From within your paint program, bring up the filter. - You will be prompted to enter your registration code. You'll find it on the cover of the printed manual.. (If there no such prompt occurs, it means somebody has already input the code on this particular computer, and so you're already finished.) - Type your code into the blank. - Click OK.  - A thank-you message will appear. You're done.   For current information on international distributors of BladePro, please visit the Flaming Pear international page.

Questions? Answers to troubleshooting questions appear online at http://www.flamingpear.com/faq.html. You can check for new releases of the filter at www.flamingpear.com . And if you have ideas for improvements, or commentary, or questions, please email lloyd@flamingpear.com.