Download Tutorial (17.5 MB)?

I’ve always had a thing for black and white images where only a certain part or area was colored. This tutorial will show you how to create that effect. I would have done someone’s lips, but I didn’t have a photo with high quality lips lying around, so I’m just using the Bumble Bee and Hibiscus photo again.

The effect is quite easy to achieve. Open your image in Pixelmator (or an equivalent). Duplicate the image layer and de-saturate the new layer. Then change the blending mode to Color. Add a layer mask and fill in the areas you don’t want to be black and white. Add a slight Gaussian blur to your layer mask, and presto!

Download Tutorial (10.2 MB)?

I use this little trick to quickly “enhance” photos for printing.  It won’t work for all pictures, but it’s generally an easy way to make your pictures look awesome with 2 steps.  Simply duplicate the layer, and change the blending mode to overlay.  This will generally make the colors in your photo bolder and provide great print-outs.

Want the pictures from the screencast? Here’s the bee and the bird; sorry, no Wasabi Peas for you…

I know it’s not much, but I hope you find it useful

Download Tutorial (17.1 MB)?

This tutorial will show you how to do a retro-nanochromatic effect.

It’ll also show how to use a few of the different blending layers in Pixelmator and explain what’s going on.

Have slow internet or is the media player not working for you? Here’s a step-by-step guide on achieving the effect:

First, open up your image. I choose this one.

Next, we want to duplicate the layer and change the blending mode of the new layer to “Hard Mix.”

Change the opacity to about 50%. Then click on Filter->Color->Sepia Tone. Adjust the slider to get a smoother edges.

Then create a new layer and choose Filter->Generator->Stripes. Make the stripes nice and big.

Change the blending mode of the striped layer to “Multiply.”

Then create a new layer. Pick the gradient tool and choose the rainbow gradient from the gradient pallet. Drag the gradient from the lower left corner of the image to the upper right corner. Change the blending mode of this layer to “Color.”

And that’s it!

Hope you like the final effect. Play around with the different blending modes and opacities to get different effects!

Hope you like our first tutorial.