Storyboard Artwork Project/Creating Tux Paint Stamps

{| cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="margin:0em 0em 1em 0em; width:98%" How to create Tux Paint stamps for the Storyboard Artwork Project
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What are stamps in Tux Paint?

 * Stamps are pictures with a mask.


 * Each stamp has a mask which crops the picture so stamps can be any shape.


 * Note : A mask is also known as an Alpha Channel.


 * In this scene, you see two men walking together. It looks natural and real.  Yet this scene was made from two stamps with only two clicks on the screen.


 * It took only ten seconds to create this entire scene. Stamps are an extremely effective drawing tool.


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{| cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="margin:0em 0em 1em 0em; width:98%" An example of a stamp
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Four channels in one PNG picture
A PNG picture has four channels :
 * A red image
 * A green image
 * A blue image
 * A mask image

In case you are wondering why they are five images for picture with four channels, the first image at the top is a quick look at all the RGB channels put together as a complete color picture.

This top image is not a channel but because the color picture is so useful, it is included in the list of channels with a channel number of "tilde".


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The color channels of the stamp
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Here are the color channels all together for a stamp.
 * The RGB channels

When you combine the red, green and blue channels, you get a color picture.

In this case, the picture is 400 pixels tall and 200 pixels wide. We need pictures which are over 500 pixels tall. For technical reasons, we prefer that you make your stamps 1000 pixels tall.
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The alpha channel of the stamp
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Here is what an alpha channel looks like. This is a gray image which is almost entirely black and white. Only at the edge of the fireman are there gray pixels to feather the mask.
 * The mask channel

In the white part of the mask, the image becomes part of the stamp. Where the mask is black, the image is not included in the stamp.
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{| cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="margin:0em 0em 1em 0em; width:98%" Where are stamps in Tux Paint?
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Things to do

 * Locate the stamps in Tux Paint and view them them with your photo editing software like Photoshop or The Gimp to see the four channels, specially the Alpha chennel which is the mask. Photoshop 4 or later will do this but I do not believe that Photoshop Elements can view channels. In The Gimp the mask is displayed besides the layer.


 * Tux Paint works on many different computers and hand held devices. Therefore, finding the stamps is not always easy.


 * On the Macintosh, you cannot simply search for "Stamps" because the search engine in Mac OS X does not search inside an application. If you use the new Macintosh (Mac OS X), an application is not just a program.  Rather an application is actually an invisible folder which contains all the elements of the application.  Using the Control key allows you to see the contents of the application folder so you can find the stamp folder in the resource folder.


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What size are stamps?
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Stamps can be any size. Stamps are enlarged automatically in Tux Paint. However, there are some limitations to Tux Paint.
 * How tall?

The largest setting in Tux Paint enlarges the picture to 95% of the full height of the Tux Paint's current screen size. But be aware that when Tux Paint automatically scales up a picture, it becomes jagged if the original is not large enough.

For this project, we will use a Tux Paint screen which is 600 by 800. This produces a painting which is 472 pixels tall. Therefore, the stamps should be at least 472 pixels tall to get full resolution for large stamps.

Besides full size images, we need the same figures showing only the upper half of the body. Tux Paint cannot crop more than half of the picture. Therefore, Tux Paint cannot create head shots from full sized images. Therefore, we also need you to create a second set of stamps by cropping your artwork to the upper half of the body. (We can do this for you if you wish.)
 * Upper half the the body
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