(New in Phatch 0.2)
This action adds a highlight effect to your image. You can combine it with a Mask or Round action for a nice button effect.
Just like watermark and mask, highlight has a preview box to select your desired highlight. Simply click on highlight and a preview box will appear.
Options
Highlight
The highlight image should be a semi-transparent image. Which will gives the desired effect when pasted on top of your image.
Resample Highlight
This option describes the method how the highlight image should be scaled to the image size. You can read more about scaling methods at the Scale action.
Opacity
The Opacity of the highlight. 100 means a strong highlight, 0 means no highlight.
Library
You can also add your custom made highlights to Phatch. To do this go to Tools -> Browse Library -> User, the user folder of Phatch will open now. Put the desired highlights into the highlight folder. Now open the highlight preview window and your new highlights have been added.
How to create your own highlight effect
Pick an image with a nice highlight effect. For example I picked this one from the open clipart library:
Then open the image with your favourite image manipulation program. In this example I'm using Gimp.
- Auto crop extra transparent parts: Image -> Autocrop Image
- Convert the image into grayscale: Colors -> Desaturate
- Make the image semi-transparent: Colors -> Color to Alpha. Then choose a Gray colour between the value 50 and 75. In the example I'm using 50. You can experiment with numbers to get the desired effect. The darker the colour you choose the brighter the highlight will be.
The following two images show the result. As the white highlight doesn't show up on a white background, a second thumbnail was added with a checker pattern (click to enlarge) as a background:
You can then use Phatch to combine this nice highlight with the circle mask. You will get a nice result like this:
