Well, creating your own twitter background and getting the feel that it's "your own world" whenever you log in to your account, is just a matter of spending few minutes in Photoshop Elements. So, let's get started-
Start with a screenshot of the default twitter background
- Login to your twitter account in your favorite browser and press the PrtSc key.
- Now launch Photoshop Elements (Editor) and press the key combination Ctrl+N.
This will create a new file with appropriate dimensions, just click OK on the dialog that pops. - Now press Ctrl+V or go to Edit>Paste
- This will paste a screenshot of the top of your twitter account home page onto the file.
- Crop away the top and bottom bars from the image.
- Now select the feeds area through rectangular marquee tool, right click and select "Layer via Copy".
- Do the same for the label having the text Home, Profile etc and also for the text "twitter"
- Once this has been done, make those three layers invisible and select the Layer1.
- Now, all that we have to do is create the background the way we want.
- Open the images you want to use for your twitter background.
- I decided to use one latge and several small images.
- File>Open and select the images that you want to open.
- I dragged the largest image thumbnail to the twitter background document and it was placed on a separate layer.
- Next I transformed the image (hit Ctrl+T) while holding the shift ket so that the aspect ratio remained intact and placed my image where I liked it the best.
- Next I made all the layers containing the twitter feeds etc so that I get a feel of what part of the image will be visible finally.
- I made the layer containing the twitter screenshot invisible.
- Selected the background layer and then selected the gradient tool.
- Now I needed an appropriate gradient, I decided to create one.
- For this, click on the gradient presets in the options bar which will launch the gradient editor.
- Click on the lower left color picker in gradient type preview, this will launch the color picker and let you select a color.
- I selected the dominant color in the image I had used.
- On the right hand side color picker I selected white.
- Once the gradient was created, I dragged it on the background layer from the left edge of the backgrond layer to the image edge.
- Next I drag the other images and transform them to appropriate sizes and orienatations.
- Once this was done I applied drop shadow to all those smaller thumbnails through Layer>Layer Style>Style Settings, check the drop shadows check box and apply the following settings-Size=43, Distance=12, Opacity=84 and clcik OK.
- Once you have done this with one layer, right click on it's layer in the layers palette and select Copy Layer Styles.
- Then go to the other Layers. right click and select Copy Layer Styles.
- Log into your twitter account and go to Settings.
- Go to the Design tab and select "Change Background Image".
- Select Chose File, go to your file location and select the file