HOW TO: Do Pixelation

I recently had a challenge placed in another group that asked for a certain form of pixelation that a member questioned me on.

This was in this tutorial:

Change your foreground to a FB/BG Gradient
Style: Linear / Angle: 90 / Repeats : 5
Flood fill your canvas

Effects, Distortion Effects, Pixelate
Block width: 50 / Block height: 1 / Symmetric: Unchecked
Effects, Edge Effects, Enhance, repeat the enhance again
Effects, Edge Effects, Dilate, repeat the dilate again

Here's how I solved the problem.

Since this was a forum type tag, let's start by opening a new canvas with these dimensions:

Open a tube of choice and a branch of some kind that will match your tube. I chose two by Barb Kermis (FTU), because both match and one has a branch.

Pick TWO colours from your tube: one light and one dark. These are my colours: #6C0038 (dark) and #F594CA (light).

With your two colours now selected, go to your tools and select your gradient tool.

Linear is ALWAYS the first gradient you see. Don't worry about Repeats. I find they did nothing in PSP that I didn't do in PDN.

However, Angle is easy to figure out. When I flood filled my canvas and angled it at 90 degrees, all it did was turn the image vertical.

So go to the middle of your canvas, pull down and then turn to angle it at a vertical level, as so:

Now you'll see THREE different shades of the colours we picked, from dark to light (as suggested by the tutorial).

See the little circles above your canvas (pictured below). You can grab those with your little "hand" and move them back and forth to move the shades as well.

When I do the second step above ("Effects/Distortion") in PSP, this is the effect it creates.

To achieve a similar effect, I used one of my 8bF filters, called "Blast" by DSB Flux.

(Scan done until you find it in the list. Undo pop ups so you can grab this, then close out the pop up. It will not give you the download if you don't unblock the pop up.)

Duplicate your coloured layer:

On your duplicate layer, do the following:

The box below will pop up. Find your DSB Flux and open it. Then, look for "Blast". (Make sure you click on "Blast" and then "Run Filter" afterwards)

Once you do this, another box will pop up, asking for direction. Make sure your direction is "left" or "right" since you want it to go across your tag. You may use "percentage" or "absolute" if you want. I used the one below but you can use absolute at 600. Click ok.

I dropped my opacity to 175 and then did an average blur of 5:

And now, I have a similar effect, done in PDN!