Planet Building with Paint Shop Pro



Planet building is relatively easy to do with paintshop pro. First select a background color that will be close or the same as the background on your html page. If you made a star field already then you might create the planet using that star field as This means if your page is going to be black or nearly black then make sure that the background color is black. Then open a new 175x175x16.7 million-color file.
Set the foreground color to the color that you want the planet to be.
Select the selection tool and set the Selection Type to circle and the Feather option to 0.
Place the cursor in the upper-left corner of the image and click and drag so that you have a circular selection as demonstrated in figure 11.1.


figure 11.1
Circular selection in Paint Shop Pro


Select the Flood Fill tool.
Click on the Fill Style pull-down menu and choose Sunburst Gradient.
Click on the Options button to bring up the Gradient Fill Origin dialog box (see figure 11.2).


figure 11.2
Paint Shop Pro Gradient Fill Origin dialog box


Enter 75% and 25% for the Vertical and Horizontal offsets, respectively.
Click OK.
Click anywhere in the selected area to fill the circle with the sunburst gradient (see figure 11.3)


figure 11.3
Colored spherical planetoid created in Paint Shop Pro


I purposely created this world a little bigger than I wanted it to be. The reason was that I knew it would be a little jagged. By creating it a bit larger and then resizing it I knew I could get rid of the jagged edges.
Choose Image, Resample.

Note: If the Resample option is grayed out it's possible that you're color depth is set at less than 16.7 million colors. If this is the case, choose Colors, Increase Color Depth, 16 Million colors.


In the Resample Dialog box (see figure 11.4) check the Custom size radio button and enter 100 in both windows under the Custom size caption.


figure 11.4
Paint Shop Pro Resample dialog box


Click OK.
You should have an image similar to figure 11.5.

            
figure 11.5
Resampled, colored planetoid created in Paint Shop Pro