Printing PGP skins without a printer
I recently purchased a Play Gear Pocket, and after reading about all the cool skining going on i wanted to make my own.
However I have no ink in my color printer, and I realy don't have the 60-70$ to get new cartriges. So I thought about taking advantage of those digital imag printing station that they have in Walmart, CVS, ect...
Here is what you need to do to prepare your skin to be able to be printed from these stations.
First make your PGP skin using a template. You can get here
As for further assistance on making these skins, search this forum as there are already topics on this.
I used Adobe Photoshop to do what I am going to tell you, but you should be able to do simular effects in any other image editing program..
Once you have your skin made do the following:
Note: make sure the background color is white before you do this step or else the added canvas will come out black.
from the top menu go to Image\Canvas Size
set the Width = 7
set the Hight = 5
Note: 5x7 is one of the paper sizes that those print stations use, and is just the right size to print on.
also in the Canvas size window in the Anchor section make sure the middle box is slected.
This will span out the canvas that your skin is on, it will distribute it evenly around your image leaving it in the center.
The reason for the above step is that these print stations automaticaly scale your image to fit the paper you slected, which we don't want. By doing this step you are tricking the system into thinking that your image is just the right size for the paper.
Below is a failed attempt at printing without doing the canvas sizing trick.
http://mysite.verizon.net/mrpenguin2003/DCP_0252.JPG
This was printed on a 4x10 panoaramic paper. as you can see that it streched my skin to fit the paper.
Now do any other editing that you desire.
Save your skin as a JPEG image. Yah, I know this can be an undisered setting but the print station will only read these. You can however save the jpeg with the higest quality. But you can play with settings to improve it.
now place your JPEG onto a flash memory card(sorry you can't use the PSP MS PRO DUO cards unless you have the adapter to plug it into a regular MS slot) or burn it to a CD. And some of these stations accept floppy disk, but your skin may not fit on one.
Go to Wal-mart or whare ever they have these digital print stations.
Use the print station, slect your skin and order it in a 5x7 print, and your good to go.
it may take a few min to print depending on the store or how their machine is set up to print.
This is how mine printed out
http://mysite.verizon.net/mrpenguin2003/DCP_0253.JPG
Now just cut it out and trim it to fit into your PGP and you have customized PGP.
http://mysite.verizon.net/mrpenguin2003/DCP_0254.JPG
The Total Cost for this print was $1.50. For me that is alot more afordable than paying 60-70 for new ink. However I do recomend that you make sure your skin looks perfect before you do this caues it would cost a lot to run trial and error prints.
If you have any comments or questions post them here.
