After some requests on my tutorial I´ve recognized, that it´s maybe not a perfect tutorial for newbies but for people who worked with programs like photoshop or photoimpact before. So in this chapter I´ll try to explain the basics of wallpapers.

1. The Wallpaper

A wallpaper is a digital image that can be set as a background. For that right click on your desktop and select the image in the screen-settings. In most cases your screen will have a resolution between 1024x768, 1152x864 or 1200x960. So if you considering in making some walls you should make them in the same size as your screen resolution (That´s 1024x768 for me). Some systems only accept so called Bitmaps as backgrounds (for example: image.bmp), there are ways to put other formats as wallpapers (for example: open your image with internet explorer or netscape, rightclick on the image and click ‘set as wallpaper’). Other formats are: jpeg (or jpg), gif, png,...They are different in their compression and format, but that´s not important at this point.

2. The Jpg

The Jpg is a compressed image. The compressionrate of a Jpg is tantamount to the detailrate and quality of your image. That means as higher your compressionrate as lower your picture quality. Low quality pictures have so called artefacts on detailed parts of the image (as shown below).

created by Ben Hassad version 4.0 impressum

If you save an image for internet usage, you should choose a compressed version of your picture. Most programs have a compressiontool for your images. If you want to compress walls, save them in jpg format, then it can be displayed with every browsertype and needs only less space. Here´s an example for an 1024x768 image:

The original bmp-image: 2,25 mb --> compressed with a 0% compressionrate --> jpg-image: 456 kb

The same bmp-image: 2,25 mb --> compressed with a 5% compressionrate --> jpg-image: 214 kb

As you see, a compressionrate of only 5% reduces your imagesize up to 10% without great losses in quality while uncompressed images only changed from bmp to jpg reduces your bmp to 20%. So you should use compressed jpgs.

3. One-Picture-Walls

Most of the wallpapers you´ll find in the internet are fanstuff and the rest are from official sites, like game or movie sites. The first and easiest wall (and the most created one) is a wallpaper with one picture on it and maybe some text (like the name of the game, person, movie, etc.). And that´s the kind of wall you should start with. All wallpapercreators had start with one picture on an one-color background (yes even me ;) ). Starting with that walls you´ll develop you´re own better walls and maybe your own style. Just experiment a bit, with the settings of your program, like text, filters and graphictools.

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