I wanted something relatively mindless but productive to do this evening. I decided that a new background image gallery for my background image site, Symmetrical Backgrounds,  would fit the bill.

I wanted some happy stuff, so I decided to make a gallery of colorful backgrounds. Some of them may be too colorful to ever find an application but they are available as options, anyway. To find images on which to base my backgrounds for this gallery I did a Google search for Colorful Pictures and hit the images link. There was a good selection from which to choose.

To make the symmetrical tiles I take a small area of the image and make a cut. Then I flip and stitch a couple of times to make the final image. My photo editor has a panoramic function that I use to stitch the parts of the images. If there is a design in the portion of the image that I choose there can be some interesting geometrics in the tiled background. Check out the Colorful Cuts Gallery.

I use Irfanview for an image editor. There is a built in function to produce html pages. I have modified the templates for use on my sites. The gallery pages that are produced use the subject image as the background image for the page.

I just noticed this evening that Irfanview can be used as a color picker. If you open a file in the window and click on a color that color is displayed as an RGB and html number. This is a feature that I will use from time to time in my design work. I wonder what other wonders lurk within the program, or many of the programs that I probably don’t use to their fullest potential.