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This tutorial is for anyone
that has paintshop pro (psp) and would like to make some bams;
the tricks can be used with Photoshop (phs) but the tools
will be named different. It also assumes that you have read
other bam tutorials and understand them.
bamworkshopI
by Max
This will cover the inventory bams However
the things you learn here can help with other areas of the
graphical sort for bg such as mos files and areas.
SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION TO
PSP
Make sure you are familiar with these tools
before you begin. The listed tools are very useful. There
many more tools but they not needed. If you are familiar then
skip this section.
1.TOOLS
__TOOL SUB MENU
Crop tool
Selection tool
__Selection
__Freehand selection
__Magic wand
Paintbrush
Clone
Soften
__soften
__Smudge
__Push
Lighten/darken
__Saturation up/down
__Change to target
Eraser
__Background eraser
Flood fill tool
TOOL OPTIONS
View
screenshot
TIPS & TRICKS
2. COLORING THE FUN PART
I'll explain two useful tools used for coloring
of your item the good and bad of both.
A. CHANGE TO TARGET.
The good side is that you can add a lot of different hues
to your item and not paint the transparent background. The
downside is that you will not get the true color of some of
the mixed half tones.
B. PAINTBRUSH.
Has a lot more features other than solid painting in the TOOL
OPTIONS you can scroll down to overlay this works like 'change
to target' but you can pick ANY color you want, the downside
is that you will paint on everything. ( to compensate for
this make a selection of the area you want to paint so you
don't go out of the lines).
3. HOW MUCH PAINT TO USE
How big of a brush, how hard should I push,
and how soft the edge of my brush should be?
A. SIZE. Unless you are going to color the
whole image with a single color I would keep the brush some
where around 1,2,or3, for fine 4-7 medium 10+ for large areas
B. OPACITY. This is one of the best tools for creating 'half
tones’. It determines the amount of color that is given to
the canvas, set by you from 0 to 100%.
C. HARDNESS. The amount of feathering that the brush will
do. When used at 30% size 20 the brush stroke will have a
very soft edge, whereas 100% is a solid edge.
4. I WANT THIS OVER THERE
Getting that thing looks so cool on to your
item.
CLONE. The
clone brush is a very nice tool when you don’t feel like making
something yourself (like me, all the time). You can take a
piece of something depending on the size and opacity and transfer
that wherever you want, meaning from the image that you are
working on or from another image that’s loaded in psp. Just
right click on the part of the image you want to copy and
left click on where you want it to go. You can also hold down
the left mouse button and drag it around and copy large sections
a small line or a shape, (look at where you right clicked
when you drag and it will show a pink 'x’ where you are cloning.
then recolor using CHANGE TO TARGET or PAINTBRUSH with it
set to OVERLAY.
5. BUT I DON’T WANT THIS
__Getting rid of the unwanted without getting
caught
ERASING TOOLS
A. ERASER TOOL. Pretty self-explanatory change the size and
the opacity for different effects. Right click to put back
(kind of nice).
B. BACKGROUND ERASER. A very nice tool for getting rid of
that unwanted color or colors depending on the tolerance I
usually set mine to 0.
6. OUT, OUT DAMN PIXEL
Getting your pixel under control
A.Soften This has now become
my personal favroite tool for getting out rough jagged edges
B.SMUDGE. This will let you get the colors
that are making a "hard line' to blend to make look natural.
Best used on a small size and no more than 40% opacity
C.PUSH. This little baby helps me soften
the pixilated look when I?m working with small images. 30%
opacity one pixel in size. NOTE: when you use PUSH at 30%
opacity on to a transparent background those pixels will only
have 30% color, latter when you flatten your image it will
be merged with 70% of whatever your background color is.
7. ADDING SHADING
Yep, that’s about it
A. LIGHTEN. When you have
your image looking kind of what you want it to be, but something
is not right. There is a light source somewhere or you would
not be able to see it. So determine where that is and use
the lighten tool, go easy on it, a little goes a long way.
B. DARKEN. Light also casts a shadow on any
thing that’s not 2 dimensional so if you don’t want your item
to look flat use some shading in places.Left click to lighten
right click to darken.
END OF INTRODUCTION
SECTION TWO: MAKING A CUSTOM
BAM
STEP ONE
When I want to make a bam, let us use a sword.
You can use this one.
First I look for an image that will suit the shape that
I'm looking for (the internet has hundreds of images of swords
google image search is good) I copy the image and I save it
as a psp image. Latter this will allow you to save just the
image without the background.
Unfortunately most of the images are jpeg and do not have
a solid background color, so you have to use the Freehand
selection tool.
In the tool options set the selection to POINT TO POINT,set
the mode to ADD, the feather and smoothing to 0, and have
anti-alias checked, try to stay just inside the image you
want.
Click, click, click tracing around the image. first image
is in the process second image is after you right click to
complete.
View screenshot
Right click when you complete the shape.
IF you make an error on your selection you can either
ADD to cover more of the image that you want or you can REMOVE.
Both just require making a selection.
Click on the EDIT-> CUT-> that removes the image that
you want. Don't worry this is what we want; it is saved in
the clipboard.
Right click on your picture to get rid of the dotted line.
Under the EDIT window click CLEAR. This will fill your image
with the second pallet color
Now click EDIT-> PASTE-> PASTE AS NEW LAYER (CTRL L).
Now we have our new object with whatever color was in your
second pallet entry.
STEP TWO
This is a good time to turn the sword on
a 45-degree angle; this will allow you to see more of your
work when it's crammed into those small frames.
First lets increase our canvas size.
Click IMAGE-> Click CANVAS SIZE. PSP will tell you what
the image size is now. If you are using the image I provided
it is 500 x 375
Lets make sure we have pleanty of space so lets set the canvas
size to 800x800
I then Rotated this image 5d to the right.
Click IMAGE-> Click ROTATE -> Click FREE ROTATE enter
5 degrees on the free selection, and Select RIGHT
You should now have an image that looks like this.
This image has been reduced for convenience
now use the crop tool
to correct the overall image size.
Click CROP. Now make a box around the sword to how much background
you think it should have. Each line can moved independant
of each other to get it just right. You can also enter the
hight and with in the boxes on this tools options bar just
above. I would recomend doing this and make it square (so
I'll be making it 440x440 I do not like a lot of background).
You can now move the croping area around, just hold down the
left mouse button and move it. Click the check box box when
it looks right.
Working with Layers
Now is the fun part the coloring and this is also why we pasted
our sword as a new layer.
To show the layer window Right click somewhere under the materials/pallet
on the right side of psp. Click PALLETS -> Click LAYERS
(F8) this will now give you an easy ability to hide and select
the layers.
You should have a raster layer and a background layer. Go
ahead and click on the eyeballs and see what it does to your
image.
Rember that the layer that is active is shaded in blue no
matter what layer you can or can't see!
When you are done Click on the background eye so that it has
a red X on it and make sure that the X is off the raster layer.
You now should only see the sword.
So lets try out the magic wand tool in the selection tools
portion.
Click the SELECTION TOOLS select MAGIC WAND
Set it to ADD and from the pull down menu select ALL OPAQUE.
Set the TOLERANCE to 0 and FEATHER to 0 and have ANTI-ALIAS
checked INSIDE. (I forgot to have mine checked fo this tutorial
D'oh)
Click on your sword, that should have placed a selection around
your sword.
Now to coloring.
Select PAINT BRUSH
from the pulldown menu on the brush options select OVERLAY.
Feel free to experiment with the colors and shading and
changing the opacity.. Remember that the edge of the
sword is usaly brighter.
I am going to use a bright deep blue for the blade but the
opacity is set at 33. click somewhere on the rainbow materials
to pick your color, set your opacity, and change your brush
shape and size. and get to coloring your blade. also expermint
with the CHANGE TO TARGET tool.
for the handle I am going to make a change using the paint
brush this time changing the blend mode from the pull down
menu to LIGHTEN (you can also just use the lighten tool, but
for this I'll use the former) I have picked a dull red, opacity
set at 73 I also have the CONTINUOUS box checked. this will
provent over laping of opacity settings. In other words you
will not have 2 shades of red if you let go of the mouse button
and on it start on it again.
Note this is how it would look without the CONTINUOUS
box checked. Also note how the image looks flat.
Before I do anything else I am going to change the saturation
of the gold metal band and rivets.
Click on the SATURATION TOOL 
and again change your size to about 7 and shape to circle
hardness about 90 and opcity to 100. Now click on the rivets
4 times each. Now the gold part that meets the blade, change
your opacity about 75 and brush over that part. undo if needed.
Now here I use 2 tricks 
to make the handle look less flat
Get your FREEHAND SELECTION tool but this time set it to REMOVE!
Select all of the of the blade by clicking around it. You
do not have to be carfull just click all around it untill
you come to the place where the handle meets the gold then
carfully make your line right click to complete..
When you are finnished you should just have the red handle
selected.
Now go to EFFECTS Click 3D EFFECTS -> Click INNER BEVEL
Change the settings to whatever you want or make them like
I did.
Now for some fine tuning.
the blade is a bit rough. Lets use the SOFTEN TOOL 
Set your opacity to about 25 and have the CONTINUOUS box checked.
this will help when we go to resize the image.
The image is pretty much done for this stage of the tutorial.
It should look something like this.
So save your image. BMP and JPG cannot save as layers so you
will get a warning If you have not flattened your images PSP
images CAN be saved with layers.
To flaten your image go to the top of the screen and click
LAYERS -> MERGE -> MERGE ALL (flaten). IF you find your
self working with more layers you can select MERGE VISABLE
this will only flaten any layer that you can see (meaning
without red X's on the eyes)
Try to expermint with different using different colors, tools,
options, textures, and effects to see what you come up with.
when you are finished flaten all your layers, psp should have
only 1 layer called background.
STEP THREE
What done all ready? 
OK, now to resizing.
Now that you have a fine looking sword it is time to make
it a workable frame. A frame is no larger than 64x64 pixels
for the large and 32x32 for the small. So save your image
as whatever, I?ll use ?swd01? for the original, keep this
image it might come in handy later. Now with your image opened,
go to IMAGE -> RESIZE (SHIFT+S) (set to lock aspect ratio
IF you have a square image) set it to 64x64, Make sure that
it is set to SMART SIZE (the rest are crap) and hit OK. Now
to decrease image colors.
Click IMAGE -> Select DECREASE IMAGE COLORS -> 256 COLORS
(8 BIT)
These are good settings but you can try your own.
Save your image As a .bmp (looks something like this)
Click UNDO to undo the color decrease then Click UNDO for
the resize.
Now you have your image back. In BG games swords usaly have
half of the blade cuttoff in the smaller 32x32 image.
So using your CROP tool select a SQUARE area that would make
a nice looking inventory icon. check your width and hight
to make sure that the dementions are the same. I chose 240x240.
Now resize and decrease as before but resize it to 32x32 this
time.
You can go one step farther by darkining the last part of
the blade like bioware did.
STEP FOUR VERY IMPORTANT!
You should now open your 2 images (the 32
Sq. and the 64Sq.). These should be your two images the large
and small frames.
If things look pixilated use the push tool at about 20-30%
and slowly methodically push the irregular pixels. HINT: Dark
pixels have a tendency to look bigger than lighter ones. When
you are satisfied save the 2 images.
Congratulations you can now import your images
to bws1 
P.S. There may be some 'pixelating' to
do once you import your images, but if you followed this tutorial
and understood it there should not be much. Have fun!
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