How to Create Free Wallpaper?

Many commercial web sites, including most wireless operators' portal sites, sell downloadable mobile phone wallpaper for $1 to $3 apiece. But truth be told, it is very easy to create professional-looking wallpaper yourself, for free. The basic idea is to first select an image you like, resize or crop it to fit the phone screen, and then convert it to a supported image format before transferring it to the phone.

If you own a digital camera, you probably have many everyday or vacation pictures you can use as phone wallpaper. And if you've got a camera phone, you probably have plenty of wallpaper candidates sitting right in your Gallery. But if you are not the photographer type, plenty of free images are available on the Internet. A good place to start is Google's image search, at http://images.google.com/. I discuss more tips on capturing fancy images later in this section.

As I mentioned before, when you set an arbitrary image as wallpaper, the phone automatically resizes or crops it. But it is much better if you process the image yourself, since this saves memory space and bandwidth. It also eliminates the uncertainty associated with the results of the phone's image processing.

To turn an arbitrary image into a piece of wallpaper, you need an image editor program. I recommend GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/), which runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X computers. You can also use the Paint program that comes with every Windows PCbut the resizing quality of Paint is poor. You should resize or crop the image to 172 x 143 pixels for Nokia Series 60 phones and to 128 x 128 for Nokia Series 40 phones. Nokia devices support .bmp, .jpg, .gif, and .png image formats. If your image is in a different format, you should save it to one of the supported formats.

Since the wallpaper overlaps with the information displayed on the phone screen, I recommend that you use images that are light in color as wallpapers. If you have a piece of wallpaper with large areas of dark colors, you probably want to reduce the contrast and increase the brightness to make it look "washed out."

Figuring out and remembering the exact wallpaper image size for your specific phone is kind of a hassle. But with the Nokia PC Suite, you do not have to do that! The Image Converter program in the Nokia PC Suite helps you convert any image to a size and format suitable for the wallpaper on your phone