Twinkling Border

Supplies
You need PaintShopPro (I used V.9),
Animation Shop and a fairly good knowledge of both
an image, not too big. My image is from Morguefile.com
An animated tile, mine is from Motzgraphics
The plugin Texturiser, you can get it here, just scroll down to "T",
unzip and put into your plugins folder.

Open your jpg and hit shift+d, close the original. I cropped my image
slightly and resized it bicubic from 501x425 by 65% to 326x276.

Sharpen, unsharp mask, I usually use radius 6.94, strength 21, clipping 6.

Add a border, 3px, symmetric checked, in a dark colour from your image, I used #2a1125, next a 12px border in a light colour, I used #e3b8d1, and again a 3px border in the dark colour.
Add borders, symmetric not checked, in the lighter colour, top, right and left 3px, bottom so your total height is no bigger than 394px, mine is 79px. Finally borders, symmetric checked again, dark colour, 3px.

Get your magic wand,feather & tolerance 0, select the wide bit of border under your picture and add a texture. I used texture, texturiser with these settings

Selections/ select none. Add your name in a nice script font.
I used the dark colour as my fill and the light colour as the stroke, width 1. Create as vector, so you can stretch and rotate, place where it looks best, convert to raster layer and add a dropshadow
I used V2, H2, Opacity 48 and blur 2.

Add all relevant credits to the artist and yourself.

If you haven't selected your animated tile yet, now is the time to do it. Choose one that compliments the image in size and colour, I don't think I did too good a job lol).
Save it to your harddrive and open it in animation shop via the folder icon. Once open, Edit/ select all. Edit/copy.
Go back to PSP and right click on the workspace, paste animation as multiple images. Minimise them all.

Now back to the tag you're working on.
Merge visible, select the 12px border with the magic wand.
Duplicate your image until you have the same number of layers as your animated tile has frames. Mine has 8.

Hide all the copies and highlight the bottom layer.
Select the floodfill bucket tool, set the foreground in the material palette to pattern and you'll see all the tile frames in there,angle 0, scale 100.

Select the first in the row of tileframes and floodfill the border with it.
Unhide and highlight the next layer and floodfill it with the next tile frame.
Carry on doing that until all layers of the border are filled with a different tileframe.
Make sure you don't use the same tile twice, your animation won't come out right.

Selections/select none.
Save as a pspimage, no need to name it, but put it a folder where you can find it.
Make sure it's PSP 7 and therefore AS compatible, in your save window, click on options and select psp7 compatible.

Go back to AS and make a note of the animation speed of your animated tile, mine is 10, if you look at each frame,
underneath it tells you the frame number and next to it the speed. start the animation wizard

Settings

Same size of first image frame
Opaque
Upper left corner of the frame/ With the canvas colour
Yes, repeat the animation indefinitely/ 10 (or whatever the speed of yours was)
Add image

Save, you're done. ;o)

Here is another example, of what can be done.
I used brushes and bevelled the borders

This tutorial was created November 16, 2005 and is the sole property of ooh...babelicious. Similarity to other tutorials is purely coincidental.
Please do not copy this or any of my tutorials, or any part of my tutorials,
to another site unless you have express permission from me to do so.
If you want to share, send the URL,
do not direct link or offer on your site.
Give credit where credit is due.
Also please do not script this tutorial