Hey guys! Gerry Button coming at you with another fantastic picture Pixelmator tutorial. Today, I’m going to show you how to make this psychedelic wallpaper type image within Pixelmator. More also, this is actually to show you Pixelmator’s great integration with Apple’s Quartz Composer. Ready, let’s get started. Begin by creating a New Image, when the new box or the new Image Dialogue box pops up, make sure you r width is set to 800, height is set to 600 and resolution at 300 in case you want to print this to a nice pretty picture, click Okay. Move your canvass over in case you want take up less from on your screen, rename the default—layer to background then go to—grab the Gradient tool and select this very soft pastel rainbow and try to come around this top corner down to the bottom corner, right about here.
Now, I don’t like to use soft colors, they’re really nice in effect, you might like them but for the purpose of the tutorial, I’m going to invert the colors by hitting Command I, and we have the—a more realistic looking rainbow now. So start going back to the normal workflow by hitting New Layer and call this one, clouds. Now, you know what we’re going to do next, Filter, Generator, Clouds, when this pops up hit okay and then go to Blending Mode, Color Dodge and set it to 50% opacity. And now, we have a nice somewhat distorted gradient looking effect. If you want, you could invert the color some which a bit different, I’m going to use the inverted version, it looks a lot nicer in my opinion. Create a new layer, call this one noise.
Now, this is something I actually missed from Photoshop being able to easy recreate noise but it’s not that hard in Pixelmator, it just does not look as great. Go to Generator, Random Generator, Go to Command I to invert this color scheme, go to Image, desaturate, set as Blending Mode to Color Dodge, go to Image, Brightness and Contrast, bring the contrast all the way up and the brightness down. I’m going to use about minus70. And you had this nice little Star Effect on the go which looks really nice already this looks like a great image you use or something, right? We’re going to make it look even better now. How do we plan to do that? Well, some like brushing will help out, create a new layer and call it brushing. Then, grab your brush tool; get the sparkly brushes, here’s my settings, 100 pixels for diameter, 10% spacing, 45% scatter and 100% flow. You can go around here and play with the shape jitter and the color jitter if you like but I’m just going to leave to what they are always asked, click okay. Now, for everyone to add the detail is where you start, click.
So what I’m going to do to help make a Line Effect is when you click right about here, click once, hold the shift key and then click up towards the corner. This will add a full line of stars or sparkles. I want to add a bit more detail so I’m going to click up on the corner and then click down here, holding my shift key so it makes another line of stars. If you want you can change the size of the stars to make it more spurs or something like that. So bring the star’s size up to 130 as I just did the diameter. And on the same layer, click just a way from it and then click up towards the corner again and then you can click here if you want and then drag down and you’ll have a nice little star effect on the go. Duplicate the Brushing Layer by hitting Command J and renaming it Brush Blur, go to Filter, Blur and everyone and everyone’s favorite Blur Effect, Gaussian Blur and hit the Droplet four times to give a nice glow to the stars, click okay.
Next, we’re going to add the quartz composer element. Now, this is one thing Pixelmator has over Photoshop is that it is able to utilize Apple’s quartz composer somewhat motion graphics little application to make great looking effects within Pixelmator. And now, I’m going to show you just a few of those and these are great, this is one thing I love about Pixelmator. Now, create a New Layer, call this one quartz, go to Filter, Quartz Composer, Generator, Travelator. Now, you get this really cool looking thing and if you’ve used Quartz Composer before, you’ll probably recognize this image or what it does. We’re going to customize its settings a little bit. So leave its time at zero to where it’s right now, change its depth up to about 0.30, which I had set it, and its pace at 0.25 where its location is not too good right now so I want to grab this little circle like down here and just drag it until I find something I want. And this is good right about here.
Just over these, you only have about three or maybe four and a half images right here, a little spheres and then click okay. Change the Color Image or the Blending Mode to Linear dodge, and you’ll get this spheres up here, right here and you can move it around if you want but I’ll just leave it where they are because it seem to fade nicely into the middle of the document. But this isn’t bright enough, so hit command J to duplicate the Quartz layer and you’ll get a really bright effect right now. I don’t want at that point so let’s bring the opacity of the top new quartz layer down to 50% so there you go.
Now, it’s less bright but it still looks great. We’re now going to add instant Bokeh Effect which is the circulated spheres you see on a lot of people’s wallpapers made famous by the website Abduzeedo, I do believe that’s how it is pronounced. So simply create a New Layer, call this Bokeh—whatever you like to pronounce this, go to Filter, Quartz Composer, Generator, Defocus and on our screen instantly you get a nice Bokeh effect on default black background, click okay for the settings. If your settings are different with mine, I’m using 0.00 for the time, 0.25 for the pace, 0.50 for the size, 0.01 for the blur and 0.50 for the density and click okay. Then, change the Blending Mode to whatever you like.
You can try Linear dodge, and you’ll get this and I’m going to bring it all the way down, below my Clouds Layer. And if this is too bright for you, you can try inverting but that gets even brighter. So we know right now that Linear dodge is not the right layer—layer Blending Mode. Try it overlay, and that’s a bit dark, you can invert it if you want but then it makes these pastel colors even brighter. Invert it back to normal and then try Soft Light. And this is somewhat what you want, you can bring the opacity down, I’m going to say to about 55. You can try inverting it if you like but you’ll certainly get this really bright color. If you don’t like the bright colors, I do, but actually this looks really nice but I like the default rainbow style. And this is what you’re waiting up with, a really nice rainbow styles, starry abstract.
Now, did I do this to show you how to make this image? No, not really, no. I did this to show off the Quartz Composer Effects within Pixelmator. Guys, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and you learned just a little bit more about the Quartz Composer elements of Apple OS X and Pixelmator itself. Thank you for watching and stay tuned for the new tutorial coming later this afternoon or early Monday afternoon, see you guys!
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