Transparent Screen Mania! (With How-to)

After Transparent screens have been hitting the News, and several sites (1, 2, 3) have dedicated their own sections for them, Tokyoahead.com could not hold back of course and create their own version. If you want to contribute, please post the image to the file section, and I will put them here!

If you do not know how to do this, please read this short instruction on "How to make a transparent screen"!


This tutorial on how to make a transparent desktop will guide you step-by-step.

If you have questions, please post them below.

1. Get a digital camera & a tripod. If your PC screen has a 1024 resolution, you should have at least a 5 Megapixel camera, depending on how much of the final picture will be covered with the screen of your PC.
2. Close all applications on the screen and set a red or green background for your desktop. Illuminate the scene so that you do not need a flash. It would reflect on the screen and objects and make things look fake.
3. Place the camera on the tripod and take a picture of your PC with the screen in place. Make sure you don't move the tripod after this, you will need it later.
   
4. Take the same picture again, but without the screen. If you have a laptop, it might be enough to simply close the laptop.
5. Import the first picture with the screen into a good image-manipulation software (The GIMP for example).
6. Now, add a layer to the picture and paste the second version of the picture, without the screen over it.
7. Make the top layer 100% transparent.
8. Select the computer screens content of the lower layer with the wand tool (which is easy if you have a uniform-colored desktop from step 2).
9. Leave the selection and make the top layer visible enough. It has now selected the exact area that would be covered by the inner area of you display without the frame. Copy this into the clipboard.
10. Now, create a new picture, empty, which has exactly the pixel-proportions of your screen (1024x786 etc).
11. Paste the clipboard into the new background image.
12. Since the screen contents from the photo are not 100% rectangular, you have to change them to be able to fill the background of your screen. Distort the contents so that it covers the whole screen without removing any part of it or leaving a white spot. To do this, you select the perspective distortion tool and stretch the photo so that its corners touch all the corners of the blank background that you just created. (see screen shots. The black box symbolizes the picture taken and the white background will be the background that becomes your desktop image.
13. Save the picture as JPG without compression.
14. Set this picture as your new Desktop background.
15. With the tripod at the same place as before, take the final shot of your finished scenery!