This tutorial is my original work and may not be copied, placed on CD or posted on another site without my expressed written consent. Please do not send the tutorial itself through email or link to any images on the site. If you have any questions or problems please feel free to email me.

This tutorial is dedicated to all the people out there that have KPT 6 and don't know what in the world to do with it :)

What you'll need for this tutorial:

KPT 6. You can visit Corel Corporation for purchasing information on this program.
**Update: Corel has repackaged KPT and you can get The KPT Collection which has version 5,6 and 7 for a great price!
A graphics program: I'm using PSP 7

An image you like...how about all those cool background tiles you've been saving...they'll make a great gel :)

People to thank:
Jarah for the fun Stained Glass Quick Tiles. The resulting tile is what I used to make the gel on my webset. These tiles do make great gel's so if you need an image, run over and do Jarah's tutorial...I'll wait for you.

Back? OK, let's get started:
1) The first thing to do, is make it easy to find the images you're using for gels. Make a folder somewhere on your hard drive and name it "My Gels" or whatever you want to call it. You don't have to do this, just makes it easy to find them if you keep them all in one place.

2. Open up your graphics program. If you're using a tile image, it will probably already be the right size of about 200x200, if not, resize it. I find this size works well. Right click on the image in the layer palette and promote to layer.

3. Add a new layer and flood fill with black, "Layers", "Arrange", "Send to Bottom". Make your image layer the active layer, then go to "Effects", "Geometric Effects", "Circle". Layers Merge layers "flatten". Save as a jpg image in your "My Gels" folder or wherever you want to put it. Now, you don't have to make the image a circle either, you can leave it a square but I like the circle. You can close this image once you have it saved, we don't need it open any longer.

4. Open a new image, whatever size you'd like to draw on and add a new layer. Open KPT 6 Gel. First, click on the picture in the Enviroment window, this opens up another window that you can browse to where you have your image, find it and click open.

5. These are my settings on the enviroment. If you have the opacity set at 100% as I do, then you don't need to worry about the tint, but play around with the settings, draw something in the preview window so you can get a feel for how it looks, play with the light settings too. See, I drew those wings over there... looks like eyes in the center, doesn't it?

6. Next is to save your gel as a preset, click on the little circle on the lower left hand side. I have a category just for my presets, click on the arrow in the right hand corner, then "Create New Category" and name your new category. Then, click on "New Preset" to rename it, then click on the "Add Preset" to add and then click on the checkmark to save and exit the preset window.

7. Once you're back in the main KPT window, create a masterpiece with your new gel and click on the checkmark to go back to your graphics program.

That's it!!! Pretty easy, huh? Now you can take your favorite tile or picture and draw with it KPT style, have fun!!!!

***A Tip for working with Gel and Selections***



Don't float your selection. Here I made a eclipse selection and opened KPT Gel, not bad but I wanted more of the colors to show. So, back I go into KPT Gel to swirl around the colors some more...ahhh, much better. But look what happens if I had a floating selection and went back into KPT...yucky :)