(rock music) 2 2
Instructor: Using Pixelmator Pro. 3 3
Let's talk about using the arrows or circles strategy. 4 4
So what we're gonna do 5 5
is we're actually gonna import two images. 6 6
So we're gonna import my favorite candy, when I was younger, 7 7
which kind of explains a lot 8 8
why I ended up like I am today. 9 9
And then arrows, okay. 10 10
So let's go here. 11 11
We'll paste it in. 12 12
And let's select those items, zoom out, 13 13
and just shrink them down so we can see them, okay. 14 14
So we start with Nerds here. 15 15
And let's just ignore the arrows for now, 16 16
so I will hide those. 17 17
And what we can always do is just double-click here, 18 18
call this arrow, and call this Nerds. 19 19
And it's important to name them 20 20
because sometimes you'll have tons and tons of layers 21 21
and you just won't know what each layer is, 22 22
even though there's a tiny little image there. 23 23
Okay. So let's take a close look now, here, at the candy. 24 24
And the reason I wanted to also show you this 25 25
is because it really has a nice representation 26 26
of the opposites on the color wheel. 27 27
And the next time you go into a candy store 28 28
or any grocery store, 29 29
look at the packaging, 30 30
and look to see how a lot of packages 31 31
have opposites on the color wheel, here. 32 32
So we know the opposite of the color wheel for green is red. 33 33
Okay, great. 34 34
And if we wanted to 35 35
we can actually put in a background layer as well. 36 36
And I'm going to do that, 37 37
and I'll make it a darker shade of green. 38 38
It's not gonna look that great 39 39
but I just wanna kind of show you 40 40
how to use arrows in this example here. 41 41
And then, after I insert that background layer, 42 42
we're gonna have to recolor 43 43
the outside of the Nerds box, 44 44
which is gonna be white. 45 45
Okay. So we have the background layer selected, 46 46
and I'm gonna use the can of paint here, 47 47
and we'll just get this darker green color 48 48
and throw it in there, okay. 49 49
Now let's select the Nerds box, 50 50
and what we have to do is we have to remove the outside. 51 51
So let's select this item here. 52 52
Hold the mouse button down and then select Quick Selection, 53 53
and Pixelmator's awesome for this. 54 54
Select, cut. 55 55
Select, cut. 56 56
Whoops, undo. 57 57
Select, cut. 58 58
Oh, it's not working 59 59
because I selected the arrow layer for some reason. 60 60
Go back to Nerds, here. 61 61
Select, cut. 62 62
And again. 63 63
Did it again. 64 64
Select, cut. 65 65
Very gently here, cut. 66 66
And we can make the brush size smaller, even, 67 67
if we wanted to. 68 68
It's easier to select, though. 69 69
Select again, cut. 70 70
Almost done. 71 71
Cut. 72 72
Cut. 73 73
And I'm gonna have to zoom in here 74 74
and I'll make the brush size a lot smaller. 75 75
I'm gonna hit Command D to deselect. 76 76
And I'll select that. 77 77
Cut. Good. 78 78
And you'll notice that there's a couple of hairlines here 79 79
which are in between areas that I've cut. 80 80
And so what I like to do at the end 81 81
is I like to actually go here 82 82
and select everything again. 83 83
And I can cut. 84 84
But let me first of all just hit the option button, 85 85
deselect that. 86 86
Option, deselect. 87 87
Option, deselect. 88 88
Good. Now watch what happens when I cut. 89 89
See that little line there? 90 90
Gone. Okay, good. 91 91
Command D to deselect. 92 92
Okay, we're done with the Nerds box. 93 93
Let's make that box pop a little bit 94 94
before we add the arrow. 95 95
So what I can do is click here 96 96
and we can add a bit of a shadow if we want to. 97 97
Let's see how it looks. 98 98
Okay, I like to blur the shadow always. 99 99
I like that, all the way around it, okay. 100 100
And that means that whatever item we put here, 101 101
we have to have a commensurate shadow, 102 102
meaning all the way around. 103 103
Just to be consistent, if we want to. 104 104
And what you could even do is, 105 105
if that bothers you, how that's not perfectly even there, 106 106
you can get rid of the shadow 107 107
and instead of that you can put a stroke around it. 108 108
But it's gonna be a bigger stroke, like that. 109 109
And then you can actually also 110 110
change the opacity on the stroke, 111 111
and make the color closer to another color you see here 112 112
but not as pronounced as black. 113 113
Okay, so maybe something like this. 114 114
It's a little bit less pronounced. 115 115
But I'm just gonna undo all that stuff 116 116
because I like the shadow, 117 117
even though it's not perfect there. 118 118
Keep in mind, 119 119
we're gonna be looking at this from farther away, 120 120
because it is a thumbnail image. 121 121
It's good enough. Okay, cool. 122 122
All right, next up we can insert an arrow. 123 123
So let me just select that. 124 124
And this arrow is way too big, 125 125
so I'm gonna go and grab it here. 126 126
And for some reason, 127 127
it looks like there's a part of it missing. 128 128
And I think it's because I might have deleted part of it 129 129
when I selected, I thought I was selecting a Nerds box. 130 130
So I'm gonna hit delete, 131 131
and we're gonna put that layer in again. 132 132
And we go back here, and get my pointing arrows. 133 133
And I'm gonna paint them on the... 134 134
Or paste them up on this layer here, on the top. 135 135
All right. Keeping it real. 136 136
Let's grab this arrow, 137 137
and I want to get rid of that blue arrow, 138 138
so we're gonna cut it out. 139 139
So make sure you have the layer selected. 140 140
Select this little icon here. 141 141
We will highlight this and then cut. 142 142
And it only cut out the arrow and not the Nerds 143 143
because we did not have the Nerds layer selected. 144 144
All right. Now let's go back here, 145 145
hit Command D to deselect the dancing ants. 146 146
Make it a little bit bigger for us. 147 147
And then what I'm going to do is, 148 148
just to be consistent, 149 149
I'm actually gonna grab that shadow on the outside, 150 150
do the same thing here. 151 151
So we'll go here, and we'll add shadow. 152 152
And we'll make the distance out there, 153 153
and we'll blur it sorta like we did for the Nerds box, 154 154
change the opacity slightly. 155 155
That's close enough, that's good. 156 156
Okay, great. 157 157
Then what we're gonna do is we're gonna export this. 158 158
So we go up here to File, Export. 159 159
And we see that it's still way under 160 160
the two megabyte threshold at the highest resolution, 161 161
so we'll keep it up there. 162 162
And I will export that as Arrows Or Circles jpg. 163 163
And we're done. 164 164
And as always I'm gonna attach all these files, 165 165
so you can use them as well, if you want to. 166 166
Now let's go and take a look to see 167 167
what that image looks like. 168 168
So that's it there, 684 kilobytes. 169 169
And it looks good. It looks good. 170 170
If we wanted to, we could have zoomed in 171 171
and refined that a little bit by selecting the eraser tool. 172 172
Okay, you can erase that, 173 173
if you wanted to. 174 174
And if you want, keep watching 175 175
and I'll show you how we can erase that outside, 176 176
otherwise you can move on to the next lecture. 177 177
Thanks. 178 178
All right, so let's go back here 179 179
and let's get the eraser, okay. 180 180
So here's the eraser here. 181 181
Now when you select the eraser, 182 182
there's a couple of different things you can do. 183 183
You can change the brush size, make it bigger, 184 184
so obviously that's gonna, 185 185
if I select the Nerds layer 186 186
it's gonna delete a little bit too much stuff. 187 187
And you can also change the softness. 188 188
The softness, 189 189
you see how there's a bunch of different rings there? 190 190
See that? It's kind of a nice look to it, 191 191
if you're not sure exactly where the edge is of an item, 192 192
or if you just kinda wanna brush erase around it. 193 193
So let's make this size smaller, 194 194
let's zoom in a lot, okay. 195 195
It's not a perfect image, 196 196
you can see it's a little jagged here. 197 197
And then what we can do is 198 198
let's just play around with it like this, 199 199
no I don't like that. 200 200
So let's make the softness a bit harder. 201 201
Nope. (chuckles) 202 202
Okay, that's good. 203 203
And we could play around with that if we wanted to 204 204
all the way around the outside. 205 205
Or if you wanna be more precise, 206 206
you can make the softness 100%, 207 207
and then drag down here in little brush strokes. 208 208
Stop. 209 209
Okay. 210 210
You wanna click and then release every now and then 211 211
in case you screw up and you wanna undo what you've done. 212 212
Undo there, see. 213 213
Almost there. 214 214
Yeah, it's good. 215 215
And what you could've also done if you want to, 216 216
is you can actually take this image 217 217
and you can turn it a little bit by going here. 218 218
Rotate it so that it's perfectly, perfectly vertical, 219 219
if it wasn't already vertical. 220 220
And then what you coulda done is grabbed this dude here 221 221
and then come over here instead of using the paintbrush, 222 222
and just go here and just very slightly, 223 223
and I took my finger off the mouse, 224 224
and I'm now using the arrows. 225 225
Cut. See that? 226 226
So it's perfectly aligned. 227 227
And we coulda done the same thing up top, here. 228 228
Okay, so, ignore that. 229 229
What we could do is hit Command D 230 230
to get rid of dancing ants, 231 231
and we can turn this so it's kinda horizontal. 232 232
Oops. It's hard to get it perfectly precise. 233 233
You can zoom in if you want to. 234 234
And then what we could do is 235 235
we could do the same thing we just did, 236 236
which is we can grab this 237 237
and we can drag it down a bit. 238 238
It's not perfectly horizontal though, here. 239 239
So I wasn't precise enough, 240 240
so let me go back here, 241 241
Command D, select Nerds, 242 242
and then turn it slightly more. 243 243
And I'm gonna hit the up arrow 244 244
so we can go right to the edge here 245 245
to see if I'm being precise enough or not. 246 246
We can zoom in, of course. 247 247
And slightly, I gotta bring this side down very slightly. 248 248
So I'm actually just gonna hit this. 249 249
Whoops, wrong way. 250 250
It's actually gotta be in half degree, 251 251
so 355.5, let's try that. 252 252
That looks decent, close enough. 253 253
Okay, now what I'll do is I will grab this guy here, 254 254
and I'll grab this and bring it down here, 255 255
and we can zoom in a bit 256 256
and then I can use the up and down arrows 257 257
to move that item, that rectangle. 258 258
And then I can hit Command X to cut. 259 259
That's kinda a cleaner look. 260 260
And if you're gonna make very big images, 261 261
or big billboards for outdoors by the highway, 262 262
you wanna be as precise as you can 263 263
and zoom in as much as you can. 264 264
And then what we would do is we would take this 265 265
and then rotate it back to the way it was before. 266 266
Yeah. That looks better, huh? 267 267
All right. And what I'll do, 268 268
hit Command D, deselect. 269 269
Whoops, go back and redo that. 270 270
Okay, and now what we can do is, 271 271
it's not perfect but let's just export it. 272 272
And I'll attach it as well, if you wanna check it out. 273 273
So we'll export it and what I'll do is 274 274
I will call it Arrows Or Circles jpg, 275 275
or actually I'll call it Arrows Or Circles version 2, jpg. 276 276
And that will look a little bit more precise. 277 277
And as always I'll attach all files I discuss 278 278
in each lecture. Thanks.