For a great stain glass graphic, you can either start out with a pattern that is already colored (what I do in this tutorial since I feel I am very color impaired), or with a black and white stained glass pattern and fill with your choice of colors. For some great free Stain Glass patterns, go to Spectrum Glass. Either way, the technique is a lot of fun and can create great results like my House of Glass splash screen. You will need to download the original stainglass graphic and the Blade Pro preset at the end of this page before you begin.

To create this graphic:

1. Open the stain glass graphic in Paint Shop Pro.
2. Up the colors to 16 million.
3. Duplicate the graphic and put the original away for future reference (easier to start over this way).
4. There are two ways you can proceed from here. If you are using a colored graphic with black outlines (as in my sample graphic):
   • Click on all the white areas with the magic wand tool while holding the shift key.
   • Save this selection to an Alpha Channel.
   • Set black as your background color. Choose Selections|Select All. Selections|Modify|Transparent Color and choose "Background Color" with tolerance set to around 30.
   • Choose Selections|Invert. Save this selection to an Alpha Channel (this will be your lead part of the stain glass graphic).
   • Choose Selections|Invert again.
   • Apply the Stain Glass Blade Pro preset. Play with the Glassiness setting until you get the depth of color you want.
   • Add a new layer. Load the "lead" selection. Expand the selection by 1.
   • Flood fill with light gray.
   • Apply the Leaded preset.
   • Load your selection of the white parts of the graphic. Flood fill with white.
   • Add text and a drop shadow to text if you want.
5. If you start with a black and white stained glass graphic:
   • Select the black outline as instructed above and save the selection to an alpha channel.
   • Click on a white portion of the graphic with the magic wand to select.
   • Expand this selection by 1 if necessary.
   • Flood fill selection with a color of your choice. You can then apply the stain glass preset to the selection.
   • Or, you can fill all the cells with color first, then load your "lead" selection, invert the selection and apply the Stain Glass Preset.
   • Load your "lead" selection and complete the graphic as instructed above.
6. Save your graphic as a jpg to preserve the color quality.
7. I diced the Stain Glass splash screen into sections for faster loading with Picture Dicer. See my links page for a link to download the freeware version of Dicer.
   
   

Shift-Click here to download the BladePro Preset.