Looking for help/tutorial regarding using DungeonArts tiles with photoshop.

[Rob Twohy]

I'm just learning Photoshop. Wondering if there's a tutorial or instructions on how to best bring in (DungeonArts) tiles in bulk and scale them automatically to my background layer. Any help with that available?

ThanX!

Rob

[Phanues]

I don't know of a tutorial for this specific purpose (and couldn't find one with a quick search in the tutorial section) nor do i have access to the tile pack you are talking about, but assuming the tiles are at least in proportion to eachother, the following instructions might help :

1. Go to File -> Scripts -> Load Files into Stack
2. In the Load Layers window that appears, your first order of business is to add the files that contains your tiles to the list.
- If you wish to select individual images, set the "Use: " field to Files, But if you wish to add all tile files in a folder you can set it to Folder instead.
- Click the "Browse.." button and navigate to the folder that contains the images.
- If in folder mode, you can simply select the folder in the drop down menu and press the OK button. In the files mode, when browsing a folder and picking individual files, press down on the Ctrlkey and left-click all image files you wish to add - you will see them getting added to the filename field.
3. Once you are happy with the list, make sure the options to "Automatically align source images" and "Create smart object after loading layers" are turned off, and press OK.

This will import all the images into a single file - each image on it's own layer. However, they will still be in a different file from your background, and overlaid on top of eachother. so we need to fix this.

4 - Select all the separate icon layers by holding down the SHIFT key, then left-clicking both the top and bottom layer in the list.
5 - To make organization easier group all layers by pressing the button or pressing CTRL+G
6. right-click on the newly selected group, and select the option "Duplicate group". in the new window that opens, select your background image file in the "Document:" field.

The group will now be duplicated to your original background file. however, all the tiles in it will still be overlapped, and they might now be the right size for your background image. however, you can now easily re-size all of them at the same time.

7. With the newly created group selected in your background file, either go to Edit -> Free transform or press CTRL+T to transform the layers inside the group. to evenly resize the tiles, keep the SHIFT key pressed down while dragging one of the anchor points. Alternatively you can change the W and H values at the top (width and height) - make sure the little chain icon between the 2 values is pressed down, if you want photoshop to automatically preserve the aspect ratio of the layers you are resizing.
8. after the tiles are the correct size, all that is left is to re-position them. this is something you will have to do by hand using the move tool i'm afraid..

I whipped up the tutorial in image format for you to refer to, let me know if this is not what you were looking to do or get stuck somewhere.

tutorial-full.jpg