Sunday, July 11, 2010

pixelmator MAC based graphic design project

Today I wanted to put together a new image for my facebook default photo.

Here it is:
Next I will show how I did it.
I used a MAC only design program called Pixelmator. It is not an online photo editor or graphic design program- I cover those in another post. This one is for Mac's only. Pixelmator is similar to photoshop and very powerful, and has some unique features. First it 'runs' off of the graphics card, so it does not use up a lot of processing power and resources. This makes it a fast program great for multitasking. It can do most of what Photoshop does, but not everything. It is lacking "page comps" and groups.

However if you are looking for a powerful and affordable photo manipulation and graphic design program for your Mac- I would definitely recommend it.

Images used:
























Ok. So I took an image of a jungle scene, a statue head, and a girl blowing a bubble.
First I started with the statue head. I downloaded the file and then right click opened it in Pixelmator. Using the erase tool, I erased all the white background leaving only the statue head. 
Next I opened the bubble blowing photo, and using the lasso tool, I traced the bubble section of the image, and then copied it and pasted it onto the statue head file.
I then opened the image file of the jungle, and placed it as the bottom layer of the statue head and bubble file. I sized the jungle image to match the statue head, so it would make a nice native backdrop.
Finally I adjusted the bubble layer by making it a little bigger, and moving it into place.
To finish the image I made a layer copy of the statue head, and added one of the many default effects available from Pixelmator, to style it a bit. I adjusted the layer positioning and opacity level of these files, until it looked how I like. Pixelmator has lot's of effects to experiment with. I recommend you make a copy of a layer and then experiment until you find a style you like.

See the Pixelmator site for more information, and great tutorials.