Making a forum bg (PSCS5)

[gfx25]

Anyone have a tutorial on making pb backgrounds? Preferably like the one SoCal has.

[Kami]

=P it's not that hard, really, if you're talking about having a 'middle' portion of a bg to go behind your board, and 'bar' portions to have to either side of it, and wouldn't really be specific to PB. ;]

Just take a blank canvas [file >> new]. set the dimensions to:
width: however wide your forum is + how wide you'd like the 'bars' to be [x2]
height: depends on the design you want on your bars. simple designs, can do something like 10px, more complicated designs would require higher.

then take a new canvas and make it the width of your board. if you want some space between the bars & the edge of the boards, add however many pixels space you'd want to either side. [so, eg: if my board is 700px and i want a 5px gap on each side, i'll make this canvas 710px wide]. again on hight, will be relative to the kind of design you have, if any.

take the second canvas, and fill it with your desired background colour. then take that, drag it [or copy it] to the first canvas and set it in the middle.

now, you have room to work with 'bars'. simple again, really. create a new layer, use the marquee tool to select on one side how wide you'd like the bars to be, and run it along the height of the canvas. fill it with your desired colour [looks like socal used a gradient of greens]. de-select, copy the layer, rotate the copied layer 180 degrees, and put it on the other side.

if you want a second set of bars like socal has, make sure you make your canvas wide enough. if you find it isn't, just go to image >> canvas size [note; NOT! image size] and increase the width to however wide you'd like. No worries about readjusting, it will add the extra pixels onto what you have equally on either site.

as far as adding design, choose something that's compatible with repeating vertically. ;] many people who make these bgs don't do that, or do something that looks good only in their browser resolution. keep others in mind too.

once you've done that, just save, upload, and put this in your global headers:

<style type="text/css">
body {
background-repeat: center center repeat-y;
}
</style>



it may take some fiddling around to get the bars situated just right. =] don't expect it to work right away - though if it does, kudos to you. ;]