Slightly Remarkable

Reportedly the best thing to use is Illustrator — and for those of you who have Illustrator, this should be a snap — but if you only have Photoshop… what do you do?

In the process of creating this header, I’d searched around for a long time, and only found one solution (well, the same solution among different tutorial sites, but I linked to the best one). It was to create a new image with a transparent background, make identically spaced (this isn’t said in the tutorial, but it won’t come out right if the spaces and widths of the stripes are not the same) stripes, and then run a Polar Coordinates filter on it. This works, but if you look at it up against a background, the edges are very rough and pixelated — it just looks really, really choppy. I don’t know about you, but I cannot stand that. I hate it with a passion. Yuck!

The fix, though, is extremely easy. Instead of making a 400×400 (or whatever size you want) pixel document, create a 2000×2000 one (yes, that’s right, 2000). Zoom out to about 25% or so, and work as if it were a 400×400 pixel document. Be careful as computers without sufficient memory may crash (oh yea, disclaimer dealy: I’m not responsible if it does). Now once you’ve evenly spaced your stripes, run the Polar Coordinates filter on them (as shown in the tutorial I linked to). After that, you have what you want, except it’s WAY too big… and if you zoom in all the way, it’s still pixelated on the edges, but you’ll notice at 25%, the edges are smooth as butter over warm bread. Now all you have to do is go into Edit – Image Size, and set the pixel dimensions of the size you want your spanned stripes to be. Now if you want to make it a gradient or add other effects, it’s a snap!