Basic Photo Editing in Pixelmator Pro | Beginners Friendly Introduction

1. Intro: Hey, I'm Mark. And in this class, I will guide you through all of the basic photo editing features of pixemorP. It's a great alternative to Photoshop for Mac. It's so good that Apple plan to buy it this year and make it a first party. Alright, we're going to learn how to place your own images, how to crop them, straighten the horizon, we'll apply some basic color adjustments to improve saturation of your colors, to change the contrast a bit, we'll dive into more advanced techniques to remove some blemish, repair some problems with your backdrop, in general, just remove unwanted objects. Sometimes that's what we need. All right. And after that, we'll do some final adjustment and a little bit about selection. So we'll try to select the subject of your picture and get rid of the backdrop, so we will remove the backdrop completely, replace that with brand new backdrop, borrow from a different picture, and then we will export all of that, as the brand new image with all of our changes that we made, right? So if you want to learn all of the basics, all of the fundamental photo editing techniques for pixel Mato Pro, join me in the first lesson. 2. Pixelmator Pro overview: Here is the interface of PixelmatyP for Mac. I loaded this sample image here. It's not important right now. You may notice one thing. It's a bit weird. Why is that? Because it's almost like a flip interface of affinity photo or Adobie Photoshop. Take a look. Our tool panel is on the right, not on the left, and our layers are on the left, not on the right. And you know what? It's a pretty solid choice. I really like this layout, and I can see the trend of more and more software doing that. By moving the layers to the left, we got way more space, four layers. To be displayed here. And because the tool panel is on the right, we got those right panels just next to them to customize how the tool will affect the design very quickly. So this interface is really modern. You don't need to stick with 30-years-old history of Photoshop and you cannot change too much because the old users don't know how to use the program anymore. Here, we got fresh, modern apple like interface. So as I mentioned, on the left is our layer panel. So whatever you add new layers, shapes, text, images, masks, all of that will be here. We can change the blending mode from here and we use opacity as well. There are some options and new addition to the layer panel in form of this special mask panel when we can add the mask straight from here. It's really handy. There's a whole video just about masks, so we'll talk about later. That's your layer panel on the left, and just above that, we got this little slider that many people miss. This is your way to zoom in and out with the mouse. If you prefer the slider like navigator field, you can do it right here. There's also interface control button here when we can fold this whole layer section to have more working space. As you can see, you can explore more options for hiding and showing interface elements, like we can show rulers. Like that. All right. Now, now let's move to the right side of the screen when we can see our tool panel. The very first tool is for arranging for moving objects around. When you hover your mouse on the tool, they will give you a short description of the tool. That's pretty handy. Most tools come with additional options that you can see here in this panel. For example, for the move tool, I can also flip objects, move them to the front to the back ad rotations, change positions. When you move to the next tool on the list, styles. This whole panel now change. So always pay attention to which tool is selected if this panel look differently than what you see in the tutorial. Double check which tool is selected. And also, it's never h to double check which layer is selected as well. Styles. This is kind of embedded in the layer sections in menu software, but here is as a separate tool on the list when we can change the field colors, add strokes and shadows to different elements, not only to the main picture but also to text to graphics and other elements that you got in your composition. Then we got color adjustments right here in the two panels, so that's handy. We got effects. There are many ready to use effects that we can just apply instead of adjusting colors and adding stuff like that by hand. Then we got important tools for selection. We got classic oval selection, rectangular one as well. We got a special button here, select subject. This button is all across the selection tool. Not only for this one specific selection tool, I can get new selection, select subject and in that moment the built in AI analyze my image and take a look, those two people in front are selected automatically. So that's pretty solid help. This machine learning selection is here. As you can see now I'm in the free selection, so I can make any free selection by mouse, people tend to call this Lasso selection. And again, we got four options, New selection, add to existing selection so I can add more to what I got already, subtract from selection. If I move to that, I will be taking away from selection and intersect. So only intersecting part between those two selections will be kept. Again, same thing, select subject, and then we can select and mask or invert the whole selection. This can be handy as well. All right. And then we got the third selection category Quick Selection. Again, you add subtract intersect. But this time you're selecting kind of with the brush. It's also called Quick Selection tool in affinity, and now I can see this highlight this yellow highlight of what will be selected. I can click and hold and I can move it across to select even more. You can modify the brush size here. You can decide that you want to sample all layers or only current selected layers here. Again, we can always use this select subject. If you want to use the help from machine learning. And how about you want to select the whole backdrop? That easy. We select the subject already. Now I can simply invert the selection, and now everything but the subject is selected. So here are our selection tools that are really important for the workflow. Then we got brush with multiple brushes, we can add colors from our swatches. We can use the custom color piquet. That's what I prefer. All right. And we can modify the head of the brush, brush size, but also how hard the brush is, we can add softness so it will be a bit blurry on the edge and opacity of the brush. That's our basic settings with smoothness 10%, that's very handy if using mouse like I'm using the mouse right now. This can make the whole stroke a bit smoother, stabilize your mouse a bit. Now we can open advanced settings to see the settings of the brush itself, like brush spacing. Shapes, smudg of the brush, the grain and shape of the brush head itself. All right, so we can modify all of that if you want. Under the brush tool, there is hidden another painting tool, that's the pixel paint. As you can guess, in that case, we got pixel perfect pencil to our disposal. In case you don't want blurry brush, you just need this kind of line, pixel out or stuff like that. That would be perfect. You can also use this in eraser mode when you erasing what is under. In our case, we got only one layer in this composition, so we are erasing pixels and see the transparency below. There's a coal fill tool, when we can fill the area with color, and we can also click and hold to detect similar colors in this area and fill them all with that color. Keep in mind, that was destructive because I covered the pixels that already been in the picture before. Again, we got several options like preserve transparency or sample all layers across the design. Then we got actual eraser tool with two modes. Stupid eraser tool. A classic one when you've got full control on the eraser, you can pick the different brush to be the eraser as well. Size, softness of the brush setup is here, but we can also use it in the smart mode. That will try to detect similar colors. For example, I click here on this building and I can now hold my mouse, I'm still holding my mouse and erasing based on the tolerance of the similar colors bundled together. That's going to be handy. What this remove Brop button doing here. If I click on that, the program will try to analyze the picture and remove the backdrop completely from me. It's going to be hidden miss it is also accessible from the very top here. There's a remove Brom button here at the top that you can click. First, we'll analyze the picture and then remove the Brom for you. That can be handy, but as I mentioned, it's hid and miss. It depends on the picture, contrast, blurs, what's in the image ready. Later on, I will show you how we can enhance this effect, how we can have more control on background removal. All right. That's our tool panel. Here on the right, we are just checking the eraser tool. We finish with the bucket tool, but I didn't show you what's hidden under. Almost forget about gradient tool that will help us to put the gradient inside the selection. In our case, the selection is the whole background. As you can see, it's a live gradient, so you don't need to keep guessing. You can just press and hold, keep holding your mouse while you adjusting the gradient to the perfect position. Then we got different gradients depending on where's the center of it. That was the linear one. This is the radial one that's in the circular shape. There's another one as the cone shape, here, the angle one. All right. So we got all the gradients here and we can change colors in those gradients, even as new one if you click on in the middle in the empty area of the gradient. All right, we cover half way through the two panel on the right. Let's continue on in the next video. 3. Exploring tools: Let's continue on exploring the interface of Pixel Mata P. Keep in mind, this is just a brief introduction of the interface. Your goal right now is not to memorize all of those tools, names, and functions. I'm just showing you what we're going to work with later on in this class. So we're looking inside the toolbox, we don't need to figure out each tool, we just take a brief look, we know what's there, and then later on we're going to work on the project using those tools, and then there will be time to practice them. I introduce eraser tool already. In the previous video, what's next? Next, we got repair tools. That's what all of those photographers really like to have because they can repair skin, backdrop problems. It's really easy quick smart tool. Take a look, I just used this brush to get rid of those leaves here and this tool can replicate the sand texture around. If you never knew about this, you can easily guess that there was a leaf here or a stone there. All right. So that's repair to very easy to use. What's next? Then we got clone two. It's almost like repair two, but this time we can make this target first. So I target the sand here, and I using exactly this area as a source for my cloning texture. All right. So we got more control. Then we go sharpen as a brush. So we can brush the area to make it sharper. It's going to be a good idea if you don't want to sharpen some noise or backdrop, blurry backdrop by mistake. So we got all of those sliders on the right to control the brush size, softness, how strong the effect is. But also we can decide they want to affect everything only shadows, midtones, or highlights. This way, we don't need to split the image into three showing shadows, midtone, and highlights because we can select that here from the brush. And there's also a very handy reset button. As you notice, I didn't make any copy of my original layer so I can just click Reset. Did you notice the sharpness of little hippo here, go back to default. Let's try it once more. I use this sharpen brush, and now I click Reset and back to normal. That's handy, but there's more. If you press and hold on this tool, you will see alternatives. Sharpen opposite, soften and smudge. All right, so that's the case. Whatever you see this little triangle in your tool panel mean you can press and hold to see additional tools hidden under. Then we go similar tool that we can make part of the image brighter or darker. Same way. We controlling this with the brush, so I can make this part way brighter. Now, let's press this preview icon. If you press and hold, you must hold it down. You will see the original one versus what you did. Of course reset it back and as you can guess the darken will make the opposite effect, so dark this area. Reset. Then we got a proper pen tool and freeform pen for drawing vectors. We can not only enhance pictures, but we can also create graphic designs like business cards, poster illustrations using Pixel Mata Pro. What's next? A shape tool again, for vector shapes. Then can be used to make logos or designs, but they can be also used to make very great masks for images. We can mask in images inside the shapes. I will show that later on. We got a text tool that we can type as the regular text. Or we can have a text on the circle on the path. All of that is here and we are almost at the bottom of the list Take a look at the Zoom tool that I never use. You know why? Because this is waste of space here on the right side to just open up the Zoom tool when I can always use the Zoom from the top panel here, or with my keyboard command plus, command minus. I never ever trigger this tool from the list. And then then we got slicing tool that is a very specific why you try to export your design as many little pictures. When you will use that when you do some layout, and when to export that and then make a website out of it. Or maybe you prepare ten icons in one file. It's in one picture. Then you can slice it into pieces and you can easily export that as one, two, three, four pictures. We can have multiple slices and then you can easily export those smaller slices from the big image as the separate files, and we can set up the format, we can set up the scaling. This is very specific use for making icons or web elements. And under that, we got no more crop tool hidden. That's why some people got problems finding this tool. Crop tool is hidden there, and crop, as you can guess, can crop out part of the image for us. And while you got crop tool selected, we got also those handy tools for rotation, straightening your image. We got perspective shifts. All of that is here in the crop tool that may be hidden behind Export for web. All right, so that's our tool panel on the right. That was just a brief, quick first look, and now we are ready to start with the actual program of the actual project based learning. See you in the next lesson. 4. Cropping: When you turn on your pixel My pro, you will get this welcome screen when on the right side, you can see all of your recent projects that you can jump back directly to them, or you can start a new project without any picture in a blank project, white paper. It's great for design projects. You can load a photo from your App pictures, APO photos, or you can just browse your MAC. And the third option is my favorite one. Alternatively, if you don't like this welcome screen, you can switch off this checkbox here and it will stop showing. You will just get this top bar when you click File New. All right. As I mentioned, in my case, I like the third option, browse files on your mac and that's how I'm going to load our first picture. Alright, so here's my image that I loaded from my hard drive. That's how you can load an image, start the brand new project from the image. Advantage of this method is that you got the image size. You don't need to worry about what should be the size of your new project. All right. Now, now we're going to crop the image. Head all the way down in the tool panel. It's maybe hidden behind Export for web. All right, you may see straightaway, if this is last use tool, it's crop. The shortcut is C. And like in many other software, you will get those white boxes around your image that you can move now inside and the blacked out, gray out area will be cropped after you click Apply. Take a look. If I apply this crop and I go back to Crop tool, it somehow still remember the original image. So we did non destructive crop. So that's a great thing because we can reset and go back to the full size. That's nice. Keep in mind, you don't need to do all that manually. Let's say you want to crop it into one to one social media post. It would be a bit tricky to adjust this to be one to one. That's why we can use here size. The different aspect ratio that we can choose from this list like square for Instagram, and then you can reposition the square or even scale it up. But remember, you scale up the square. The aspec ratio is set up here. So if it's kind of bothering you, you forget about this option, you need to go and put it back into custom size or custom aspect ratio, so you can freely transform like before. All right. And from here, we can also modify the perspective a bit. So we can fix all perspective mistakes from your camera, horizon as well, left and right perspective. By default, we got this overall rule of three, but you can change the grid. If you got some specific case scenario, you can modify the grid. This is the default grid for most cameras. So that's what I'm going to use. As you can see, option to delete all of the crop pixels. So all of that will be lost. The size of your project will be smaller, but it will be distractive. So keep that in mind. If you check this on, you optimize the project for smaller size, but it's all lost. If for some reason your picture loaded in the wrong angle, you can make full rotations here. Or if you got the horizon that is not straight, you can have small rotation using this tool here. In some cases, you can use Auto straight if the horizon is really visible. You got strong contrast on the horizon, the program should be able to detect that. There's also option to mirror flip horizontally and vertically. All of that is hidden inside the crop tool, so that's why many people miss those features for straightening images or for flipping images. All of that is here. And then we click Apply and we managed to load the image. We managed to crop the image to one to one proportion. And now the next step will be to export this image with the new cropped proportion. We can do that by clicking File. Export. I know exporting for web for Instagram, so I can also choose export for web and it will bring me back to this tool here at the bottom. When I can set up the format as PNG or JPEG, we could also Jif SVG, but in our case, it would be not SVG, this is not a vector graphic. It's also web picture and MP four for videos. In our case, we choose between PNG or JPEG, JPEG will do. Quality can be adjusted with this slider. I will go with 85% so the compression is not that hard, and then I can click Export. You can select the location and you can save it. I will modify the name. I will have Instagram because I crop it into the proportion one to one that is perfect for social media. That's how you can load an image and crop the image into certain aspect ratio. Keep in mind, I just use a random stock image from the website called splash. So if you cannot find any interesting images on your hard drive to do those little lessons exercises, feel free to browse the website called splash. There are hundreds of relative free images that you can use in your practice. Later on, we're going to start the actual editing project. I'll guide you step by step, and you're going to use kind of the same image across several lessons. But this first introductory lesson was focused on how to load the image, how to crop it. I hope you managed to do it on your site, see you in the next one. 5. Basic adjustments: Our last action from the previous video was to export this as the brand new image. That's why our export tool is now selected. It's a good hobbit to go back to very first move tool if you are not planning to do any changes. So this way, you will not indicate a brush, painting, erasers or selections by mistake. This is really simple, good hobbit to have this can streamline the process. The shortcut for arrange tool for the move tool is V. So this can be your default tool if you don't know what to do. Next, you need a second to think about it. Why not to switch back to the arrange tool, click V on your keyboard. This way you will be safe that you will not misuse any tools. All right. And now now we want to apply some very basic color adjustments. So now we go down in the tool panel to our tool number three adjustments. Alright. It may be a bit overwhelming at first. Depends on your experience with photo editing software, but there are so many different sliders and things we can break here. But don't worry. Everything can be reset to normal. Take a look. If I put drag something and mess up the image like that, I can click here. Reset. Okay, so don't worry about it. Right now, we can always revert. So let's go all the way up here first so we can adjust some basic stuff. It's also called basic as well. If you cannot see it, you must turn it on. Let's switch off everything first. To organize this panel a bit better. All right. And then I turn on just basic. In here, we got exposure at first. As you can guess, moving this to the right will kind of give you a bit more light. But we cannot oversaturate the image and burn out the details in the backdrop. Other way around, we go into dark colors. Okay? So saturation is a great way to make it a bit darker or a bit brighter. But in general, you cannot go too far. If you want to go farther than this, you need to work with specific color range. Only highlights, for example, highlights can be a bit darker. Shadows. Shadows can be a bit brighter. Brightness? No, brightness stay 0%. That's perfect brightness. How about contrast? Yeah, I can give it a bit more contrast, black points. Let's make them a bit darker, huh? Should we make them darker? No, I think we now making our details too black. Other way around, let's make them brighter and in this case, we need to go left, so it's a bit not intuitive. Look at this histogram here. You see the spike, the spikes usually mean you're losing some details. So let's try to flatten the spike a bit. Okay. Texture can give you this additional feel like everything got a bit more focus. It's very interesting, but you can easily add noise to the backdrop by mistake. Take a look. The backdrop is a bit noisy now. So never go all the way to 100. Just 6% will do, and clarity is a bit of similar process, but in this case, it look a bit more like you got a bit stronger contrast from between foreground and backdrop. Backdrop would be kind of blurring away if clarity is reduced. So almost like the opposite to the texture. All right. So everything is a bit softer now. So all of those slides are just for basic color adjustments. In our case, we can now click here show the original one, so just click and hold. This was the original one and we bump the texture a bit so we can see the fur a bit better, and we got a bit more brightness, but we do the combination of exposure and other sliders. So we didn't burn anything. We use the highlights to -17, so we didn't make the backdrop too bright. The stone here at the top left. Okay? So all of those sliders are for basic color adjustments. And that's what we did so far. We love the image of the cat we found on the hand splash. We crop it to one to one proportion and adjust some basic sliders. If you don't like the effect you get, remember, you can always click Reset here. We back to the beginning and now we can start again. Okay, and then of course, you can press and hold to compare with the original one. All right, so we got some basic brightness contrast. Apply on this and how about colour saturation? It's not here as you may notice, so we need to go and search for the color saturation in hue and saturation. Open this up. And then you can bump in the saturation of the overall image by moving the saturation slider to the right. So the cat is now a bit more orange, I guess. We adjust brightness, we adjust saturation. That's what we can call basic adjustments. Everybody should be able to do that. And again, remember, we can compare the original one and reset if you mess up something. Let's move to the next step of the basic photo editing. I'm talking about removing blemish and moving unwanted objects from your pictures. See you in the next lesson. 6. Repair tool: All right, with all of those basics out of the way, now we are ready to test out our knowledge and extend on that using the picture of a real person. If you've been just watching so far without any practice, that's fine. But now now it's time to start the actual practice together with me. So I'm here on the unsplash.com where I'm going to download image of the person. You can use image from this website or you can grab your own personal image. The thing is some of those pictures online are already over edited. That's why it's a little tricky. I searching for skin curve pictures. So we're going to have actual natural skin in those kind of cosmetic related pictures very often. So that's what I'm going to do here. I'm going to download this image. And we already know how we can load this in Pixel Ma Pro. Select the third option, browse files on your mac, and images from the Internet will land in your downloads folder. So here it is. Open this up. All right. If you want to do cropping, we already know how to do it. The crop tool is at the bottom. We can crop out something that you don't like. We can straighten the image, so we can do it as the very first thing after we load the image before we start even editing. Okay? In my case, I really like this ratio, I will click Cancel. All right. We already explore some basic adjustments. So let's go back to color adjustment. That's the third tool on the list. And again, we can modify exposure. We did it before. We got some other shades, like highlights and shadows that we can modify directly. And also saturation. If you drop the saturation to the very bottom, you will get the grayscale image, almost like black and white thing. Not the best way of doing black and white, but one of the ways. All right. We did not play with the color balance just yet, so let's open this up. As you can see, we got this very handy pointer here that will allow us to move highlights around and we can do it from mid tones and shadows as well. And if all of that is really confusing, take a look what's here, ML. If you click ML, we are using machine learning. We will get the preset made by AI for this image. Always press and hold here to compare with the actual image. I think it's a bit better. Of course, we can make a modification on the top of that if you like. I think it's way too green now. That was actually good choice to move the slider here. Brightness of highlights on the slide on the right, and then we got the saturation, the color itself here. All right, if you're not sure, why not to use ML machine learning to help us out a bit, huh? All right, so we use color balance, machine learning, the AI version, and on the top of that, we're going healing, doing some healing on her skin. To do that, I recommend to zoom in really close like that. Now I can move around the image very easily with this hand tool. Let's grab a proper healing tool. It's here on the list. You can decide about size of your healing brush and then we can start to paint over some elements that we want to clear up. The healing brush will analyze the texture and color around that area and try to fill it in with the same thing. So it's very good for removing, like, a small skin problems or maybe some backdrop elements that popping up here and there. Something that is distracting for the viewer, but you cannot overdo it. All right. It's always good idea to zoom out after this because nobody will see it at that close. All right. We clean it up a bit but not too much, still rather natural or maybe one more here. Here. Sometimes sometimes you try to use this tool and it's not effective because the texture around is not good enough for us or maybe he's picking the wrong thing. In that case, instead of using the automatic repair brush, we can use the clone one just below. In this case, we can set up the source ourselves. If I put source here on her eye, I will be cloning the eye. Not what we need. So we can put the source somewhere and then we are sure that program is using this area to give us the correct texture. Of course, we can modify the size of everything. Smaller size will be a bit better. Okay. And as you may notice in the layer panel, this new patch of skin is a brand new layer. So you will need to merge it back to the original picture in order to continue on working on the whole thing. We can do that by selecting both layers. So I'm holding Shift, I select both. Now I can right click and select Merge. This way you made one layer out of two layers. All right. So we did some per brush, we did some cloning brush, and now we can move to the next thing on the list. We got three options hidden here. We got sharpen and softer and smudge. In our case, we will get sharpen. We will use that around the eye. And her lips. A bit about the nose here. And then we change to soften. This one I want a brush to be bigger, but the straight of it will be lower. All right. And then we can soften some areas to get a bit less texture in some facial areas. All right. This brush need to be a bit bigger. And as you can see, the straight is only 42% in my case. It's going be 50. All right. I'm using all, not only shadows and midtones, I softening everything a bit. Okay. If you press and hold here, I can see the preview of the previous one. It's very subtle change. Okay, let's move to the next thing. Next thing is for adjusting local brightness, not with the slider, but this time with brush like feature. We got this darken color here, and I will try just a little bread like that. Okay. Same here. And then opposite on her neck here will put a bit more shadow. So I move to the dark color, and I will put a bit more way too much. What can we do now? We can undo our change. So to do that, we simply press Ed it undo or we use Command Z to undo very handy shortcut. Alright, so what we need to do, we need to make this less powerful but deducting the straight of it. Still a bit too strong, huh? Maybe just 10%, then, and a bit larger brush. All right, it's time to zoom out. Did you notice when I zoom out, the brush remain the same. I work with way bigger brush. The brush is expressed as 32%. So it's not in pixels, so keep that in mind. Now I need to work with the brush again because I zoom out. All right. So we make some subtle changes here on her neck. We make the neck a bit darker. Make the face a bit brighter. In the next video, we try to cut out the backdrop and replace it with something. You. 7. Cutting out object: All right, let's try to cut out this person from the backdrop. During the interface introduction, I mentioned this removed backdrop button at the top. It's the quickest way, but not the most precise one. As you can see, it's removed part of a head here and there. So if you are really in rush and don't care about equality, that's can be a solution, but not in our case. So let's undo that. As you may remember, Command Z, Command Z, and let's try to do manual selection. There are several selection tools available. From basic shape selection that is actually useless for us right now because we are not selecting an object, but a human, so we will deselect by clicking the Diselect button and another tip right now, don't forget to deselect. Why? Because if you make selection somewhere like here, and then you try to use another tool like this blue brush. I try to use it on this picture, and nothing is appearing. I don't have any error message as well, so it's really frustrating. But actually, you can only make changes inside your selection. Take a look. I can only erase stuff inside this area. So stray selections can be really frustrating things. So never forget to diselect. All right. Back to our topic we cannot use the shape selection. Let's click free selection. From here, we can make a new free selection by drawing by hand, like Lasso style selection. It's perfect for many use cases. But in our case, I think we got very strong contrast between the person and the color behind. So we can benefit from the last selection option. Let's deselect. Let's head to quick selection. It's more like selecting by brush. Here we can set up the brush size. So that's nice. You can start by auto selection, so let's select a subject. All right. And now we can just fix the selection because we see problems here, zooming and now I need to add to selection. So don't use new selection, change to add a bit smaller brush, and now I just need to add this area. Perfect. We fix one thing. How about here. All right, we add this and this Alright, we're adding elements to existing selection. Press and hold space bar to move yourself around while you are zoom in. Take a look. You can zoom in. You don't need to now zoom out. You can just present hold space by get this little hand icon that you can move around. A, we almost missed this one. Good that we zoom in, huh? All right. Let's inspect the selection. All right, looks good. Now we can use this selection to put the mask on this layer. To do that quickly, click here. Add mask in the layer section. All right, we just mask out the backdrop. The backdrop is invisible, we only see the person. So that's a perfect for us as we plan to replace the backdrop. We're going to put a new backdrop image in the next video. 8. Replacing the backdrop: Alright, we applied the mask in the previous video, and as you can see, my mask settings are still here at the bottom, I didn't click down just yet. So you don't need to accept what they give you when you put in the mask, we still got chance to make small changes. As you can see, there's a brush here, that I can show again, part of the backdrop or eraser when we can hide something. There's always a chance to make some final twigs, final touches just before you click done. All right. It's also option for sliders, so we can adjust the brush size we're using for those two options. We got feather that will make the mask a bit blurry at the edge. And few additional options related to the mask. We can invert the whole thing as well. But in my case, we are removing the backdrop, so click Done. And now we need to search for a new backdrop for this image, and I'm going to use splash once more. Alright, I found this wall, white wall, so I'm going to download this image. And now we will try to simply drag and drop a new image to our design. Here it is. Using the arrange tool, we can now put rotation on it. Or you can type it from the keyboard. Let's zoom out a bit so we can see the whole project. We will need to stretch this a bit. All right. And of course, re order our layers, so this is shown behind the person. Okay. That's nice. We got now a backdrop. Instead of the original one that we remove, we put our own alternative backdrop to the picture. The final touch will be to make some color grading in the overall image. Let's do it in the next video. 9. Final adjustments: Alright, we're going to wrap up this basic photo editing project where we load the image, we remove some skin problems using the repair tool and the clone tool. We add a bit of brightness here and there and a bit more shadow. We also sharpen just slightly ice and very slightly softer blur checks and remove the backdrop. So we make the whole selection and apply the proper mask. This mask is non destructive, so in any moment, I can get the original picture back as you can see just by switching of the mask or removing it completely. We put a brand new image behind the original image to work as the backdoor for this image. All right. Now we're going to do something that is not recommended if you plan to work on this later on. But in our case, I just want to do it to show you kind of the final example here, final result base versus what we have at the beginning. So normally I would save this as the project. Not like export just PNG, I will save it as projects so I can have layer structure to some editing later, okay. But for now, I will now select all of that and I will copy hoofing, common C, comment V, and I will merge it all together. Okay. We got all of this merged together. But I still got the original copy of those three layers in case I want to make some changes. With that merged together, we can again go back to the tool panel on the right, color adjustments, and this time we will explore those ready to use adjustments, ready to use filters here. From here, you can, for example, turn it into black and white picture using those pre made adjustments. In our case, let's explore modern film. There are a few adjustments for us to apply to the overall final image. I will go with this one number six. If you feel like nothing is interesting, you can always try with AI adjustment over here, ML for machine learning enhance. When the program, analyze the colors from our image and give us a suggestion. Alright. The suggestion was pretty close to what I choose from the list. Nice. Okay, with that, out of the way, let's compare our picture with the first one we download from the Internet. So I drag and drop the original one over here. I'll put it just below. And this is what we got right now. This was the original one, okay? So what we managed to do, we managed to remove a few pinples from the face, change the backdrop, and give it a bit more saturation across the board. All right. So that was our basic editing project, and now we are ready to save this new version of the image on our hard drive. So again, we can head to file and save it as the project. So later on, you can back to it and make some changes, but also export as the final image. We can keep it as PNG or JPEG, as you can see versus the save for web. Now we got more formats to work with. Even PDF is here. We can save it as PSD, Photoshop document as well if you plan to send it to somebody with Photoshop. The good news is your layer structure will be still here. So the documents will be on layers as well. Let's save it as JPEG. You can decide about the size. You can scale it down if you like, so we can use only 50% of the original size to save some space on the hard drive or maybe the image is too big to post it on the web or send through email. Okay, let's export and we save it as JPEG that can be easily shared. So now we got a basic understanding of all of those retching photo editing tools available here on the right. 10. Circle crop: Before we wrap up one more little common use scenario, as you may notice nowadays, the circular avatars, circular pictures and resumes of portfolios are really popular. So how can we crop our final image into a circular shape? Two ways of doing that, we could draw the circle first and then kind of put the image into that circle using the clipping mask, but now they give us a better way. So we use mask before here. Remember that? We mask out the original backdrop. So we will do something similar, but with not with the selection like before, but this time with the vector shape. So click on the layer we have created if you'd like to have a circular avatar. Then at the very top, we got atmsk, but this time we're not click ATMsk from selection, right? The first option at mask from the current selection right now will be nothing on the whole picture, you could say. And instead of that, we can go for shapes. There are some popular shapes at the very top, but let's explore all shapes. So click custom shape. I'll give you this very handy menu where you can actually see those shapes. Take a look. All of those vector shapes are here in the program. So let's try something crazy before we go with the one we need. For example, you put something like this, then you click Done, and the picture is shown only inside that mask, right? Okay. Of course, we can double tap and modify afterwards as well. That's really nice because the shape is non destructive means it's sharp all the time. It's made by vectors. You can invert the whole mask like we did before and you can change the shape from here as well. All right. So that's how you can very quickly create a circular mask ova mask for your image. And then with mask like that, we can see this checkerboard. Checkerboard indicates transparency. So I can very quickly now maybe crop this bottom part out as well that we don't need anymore. And with that, we can very quickly export this as P and G with transparent backdrop, so we had to file export. And don't forget to change to PNG. This is the format that supports transparency. All right, so that's a little handy tree in case you want to use the picture with circular shape. All right. In the next video, we're going to explore some effects. We didn't have much chance to add extra effects here. We don't want to over edit this one, but I still want to show you some additional effects available. 11. Keyboard shortcuts: Knowing some essential keyboard shortcuts can really improve your experience with the program. You can speed up thanks to that, because you can use keyboard to toggle different operations and tools instead of just searching for everything with your mouse. Those 25 essential shortcuts lists are usually very overwhelming. That's why I prepare my personal top seven. So here it is. The first one is the most useful one that's simply undo. You move something around, you delete something, you mess up. What next? What can we do after we mess up with our document? We can simply undo by pressing Command Z. You can pass it again and again and again and go back in the history as long as we got those steps safe in the program. Okay? So we can undo multiple times, super useful for fixing your mistakes. Then we got Diselect. I already mentioned how dangerous it is to leave the stray selection. So if I got selection somewhere in the document like that and I forget about it, all of my tools can only work inside that selection. So it's really frustrating to do something outside the selection without realizing that we got selection on. So comment Diselect and you don't need to worry about those stray selections. From other side, if you got selection, but actually, you want to select the opposite, everything else than this, you can press Command Shift I. Now, everything else is selected outside this rectangle. All right, let's deselect that and move to the next shortcut. This one is something I show you do during the lessons. We can press Command G to group, right? So I can have two layers together, select them both, then press command G, and that's just one group that we can open and see what's inside this group. Times when you zoom out really far or zoom in really close, that's usually the second scenario. You want to zoom back to the fit so you can see the whole picture. For that, we press Command zero, and you will have this Zoom to fit. All right, we got two more to go. The next one are square brackets. By default, there's nothing happening with square brackets, but if you select any tool based on the brush like this quick selection tool based on the brush, I start pressing those square brackets. You will be increasing or decreasing the size of the brush. Of course, if you pick regular brush from the list, I will be also increasing the size of the brush or decreasing the size of the brush. Okay? So I don't need to go with my mouse. Here, I can just use square brackets with my left hand on the keyboard to smooth the whole workflow with that. So any tool that is based on the brush head will benefit from this, right? So erase the tool as well. Take a look. Square brackets, up and down. So that's for increasing or decreasing brush size without using mouse for that very handy. And the final one is arrange. If I press V on my keyboard, I got this move to the arranged tool back, the very first two on the list. I mentioned that you can think about it as the neutral state of the software, so we are not going to paint something by mistake. This is the default state of the program when this tool is selected. We got all those handy arranged option highlighted on the right as well, we see size and position of the objects. So it's really good habit to go back to this tool if you need a moment to think about your next step. And here there are seven essential keyboard shortcuts for pixiay to pro on your MAC. Command Z to undo your last action. Keep in mind you can press it multiple times. Command D to diselect, get rid of the selection. Command Shift I to invert the selection, Command G to group selected layers. Command zero to Zoom to fit, square brackets to increase or decrease the brush size, and V to jump back to the move tool. All right, learn about those seven essential shortcuts and I'm sure you will speed up your workflow in this great software. 12. Exploring effects: If you try to search for effects in pixmtdP, you may be a bit confused because they may appear in two different section of the interface. First, you may notice effects here on the right side. You got styles, then you got color adjustments, and then you got effects. If you open that, it's really hard to tell what should we do next add effect and then there is a whole gallery of effects that you can choose from with very handy previews. But you can also access all of that from the menu at the top if you had to format. Effects, you will get the very same thing in the more classic manner, something that you may know from different software like Photoshop. So all of that is also here, but this time without the preview. So if you want to trigger the effects gallery, that's from the right side from the tool panel. If you want the classic list, quick list, it's also here in the format section. All right, so let's check it out. First group is for blurs. The most common use blur is called Gaussian blur. And if you apply that, it will simply blur the whole image and you can control this process with the slider. Take a look. We can delete this effect now or we can just keep it and switch it off temporary. That's also possible. We can add another effect on the top of that. We got distortions. Again, there is a slider to control all of that. What if I turn on back the blur? It's also apply and order of the effects matter. Take a look. We can reorder those effects and the results will change. Let's get rid of both and add another distortion. This time, I will add the vortex swab. And as you can see, we can modify the radius, also amount of distortion. But there's icon here at the top that will help us to move the location of it. It's really nice the interface choice because we can see this line popping up, telling us exactly what we are working on. Nice, and then you can click on it again to deselect that element. Very handy. All right. We got sharpening effects. We got color adjustment effects. Take a look we can make overall color adjustment with just effect, but as you can guess, you can have way better results if you actually go to Color Adjustment Tab and play with multiple sliders. Not something I recommend. Tile, this will turn our image into some kind of artistic form. You could say we can put it into a tile, I create a pattern out of it very quickly. Let's delete all the effects we got so far so we can explore another one. In here, you got several different ways you can do it with tiles. Take a look. Here is a very artistic approach to photo editing, I would say. We can go into very small numbers as well, almost like negative tiles. All right. That's interesting. Let's move forward. We can add certain style to our photos like light leaks. That's very popular way of adding style to certain pictures. We got those pre made light leaks for us. We don't need to search for this stuff online and apply it on the separate image. Take a look very nice. We can adjust how strong will be this leak of the light. Okay, so all of that is here. We can move it around as well. If it's not active, click on the circle to move around the center point of the effect, okay? But that's not all. Very classic boke with several different texture based bogies. So this is really realistic. It look really, really real. I would say, of course, play with the sliders. All of the adjustments are here for you. There's a comic one. And that's the last one in style now, we're moving into half tones when we can apply those half tone patterns. It's also handy if you make a duplicate of your layer first so you can literally make the copy of the original one, then you can apply some styles to it, and then you can play with manging that new version with the original one, using the blending modes, using the opacities. That's also possible that we also open new effects, you could say, blending the effect with the original image. Again, don't forget about all of those control points that are really, really handy. They allow us to modify how the effect will play out. Okay, let's remove that and add another one. We got generated that will replace our pixels with generated graphics. In our case, we got the image, so that's not the great thing. So let's make a brand new layer for it, that will create a brand new layer that is blank at the top, and now I'm going to add effect to that layer that is generated, like clouds. Okay? Something that can be used as the very nice texture if you've got very, very, like, unrealistic image. Alright, we can change that to something else we can generate some kind of star black like that can modify the color of it. And then we still see the original image below. We didn't replace our original pixels because we make a layer for it. Below, we got fill effects. And again, replace my pixels, so that's not ideal. I will not just use that probably I will make a new layer of certain fill, and then we got other effects. So there are a few extra effects like perspective transformation. Take a look. We can add a perspective transformation to our layer just pulling those corners. We got Alpha two mask, high pass, low pass and frequency separation as well. So we can separate those tones and control them from those sliders. High pass and low pass in one. Filter. All right. So that's the whole range of different effects. Again, go to the 42 on the list here called effects little star icon and you can click A effect to see the effect gallery. They are grouped in different categories. And if you've been using photo editing apps before, you will be familiar with most of them. The naming is exactly the same. We got blurs from the top, distortion, sharpening effect, some color adjustments and I do not recommend. I still recommend to actually do adjustment layer the one we learned about before. By hand, we got tile effect that can give really artistic, unique, abstract effect. We can put certain styles on the top like those light leaks. We could have vintage styles, pixelated styles. All of that is here, half tones, then we can generate textures or light effects or clouds. We can generate fills with gradients, with colors, with patterns. Keep in mind it will replace the current layer, so try to generate stuff on the brand new layers. Then we got few other filters also cram here at the bottom. If you prefer the list, look. Click Format and there's also effect this as well. All right. That was just a quick overview of available effects in PixelmaP. Keep in mind, we got this whole format section here at the top. When we got all of those additional options outside the tool bar, we are now exploring effects. There also color adjustment that you can trigger from here. We know them already from the toolbar, the styles same as in the toolbar. So there are many interface elements correlated to the tool bar. But there's something that is missing from the toolbar it's over here. We can denoise our picture. And now we can have this before and after, slide in the middle, white line, and we can change how strong the denoise really is. If you are happy with it, click down. If it's not good enough for you, click Cancel and try alternative ways of removing the noise. All right, so that was the effect panel here on the right. 13. FAQ: If this class was a regular life in class session, it would be way easier for students to ask some questions and get some answers straightaway. So to address that, I have created this additional video we frequently ask questions about this great software. So very common question is how we can resize an image. Some people just need just that. They want to put the image, change the size of it to be smaller, to be in certain exact size, to be in certain crop, right? So let's address that first. There are two ways we can approach this. We can first create a blank project with that actual size. So I can head to file new and I can make the project in that very size, the empty project with white paper, you could say, Okay, so let's say you need I don't know, let's say, four times 3 " exactly. You create project like that and you got white paper like this, you can now drag and drop the photo on that setup size. All right, and the photo is loaded in the full size, you can see here on the left in the layer panel. Now we can zoom out a bit and see where the photola is. Take a look. It's way too big. So now you can freely modify that by scaling the picture down, and some of the picture may actually pop up on one of the sides. And this way you don't need to worry about cropping. It's just too big, so it's popping out somewhere. Alright? So you put the image on the size it from start and now you can save it as the new file in that size, right? So kind of reverse engineer whole process, but I think it's very effective method. Alternatively, we could load the image first like that, and then then we can play with building tools. As you already know, we got something like crop tool that you can crop the image, but you can also put the actual size you need here. So if you, for example, put 2000 times 1,000, they will give you this crop size exactly, and you can pick that part of the image exactly in this size. Yeah, but that's maybe not the case for us. So let's cancel that and see what's the actual size of it. Here in the image menu at the top, you can click Image Size and you will see size of it. Let's say you don't want to crop the image, just want to make it smaller as it is. We go to image size from the top manual and now we can type the new size. 2000 pixels wide. You click Okay, we got smaller image. Now we can just save it file, save this new version, the smaller version of the image, and done. So that's how you can resize the image. You can make the size as the blank document, drag the image in scale it by hand. That's good if the aspec ratio is not the same that you got. If you just want to have exactly the same memory smaller loaded, then go to image image size, and that should solve the problem from question number one. All right, how to get Pixelma for free? I don't know, and I don't think there's a free version of it. There may be some free trials from time to time here and there, but I don't think you can get a free version. How to update PixemaP as this is a native Apple app, you simply need to update this through your app store. It's really easy. When you open up your app store, head to the updates at the very bottom and you will see what apps are outdated. Then you click Update next to that app or you can update all from time to time. Okay, and that's how we see this. You can check which version of PixelmultiP you operating on right now. Click at the very top name Pixel Mata Pro about Pixelmator Pro and they will give you pop up showing you that in my case, that's version 3.6. All right? That's how we check the version. That's how we also update through the Appstore. Pixelma Pro Android, not really. And there's no chance right now as Apple officially confirmed they going to buy Pixelmator Pro so everybody's guess is they will keep it as the exclusive Apple ecosystem product. Oh, and if you see some shady apps like PixelmaPfon Android or Windows, there may be some Marwa software, so don't download that, ok? PixMtaPs only available from the Appstore right now, and that's it. How to add Text in PixelmdPs a dedicated text tool that I used to add this text. Here it is on the right side is letter T, like in most software, then you can just click and you will get the textbox that you can type in. You can modify the font. You can change the color of the text as well. You can change the size of the text. All of the basics are here on the right side. All right. I spiked P one time purchase. As recording of this video, yes, it is. It's just one time purchase from the app store, and then you can use it and all those updates that come after that were free. All right. And how to convert an image to black and white. Let's do just that. So there are two ways. One is to just drop saturation. I do not recommend this way. You can head to color adjustments and we already play a bit with saturation. If we drop the saturation completely, removing colors. You got this grayscale image, but it's way better if you actually use the dedicated black and white filter. Instead, at the very top, you can go to black and white. And there will be a few pre made filters, depending on the original colors. For example, the first one is making the sky and into similar color of contrast. So take a look. Second one is a bit better. So depending on the original colors, different colors from the picture like reds, Blues will be turned to different shades of gray that six premads and of course, you can later on play with additional sliders for contrast and stuff like that as well. But this is the best way, color adjustment, black and white adjustment, and then you can play a little bit on the top of that with contrast and you should be good to go with the black and white image. Here are some frequently asked questions. I hope this was helpful. If you got other questions, feel free to ask. Bye. 14. Summary: Okay, let's summarize the class. Now you know all of the basic photo techniques available for you here in Pixelmator Pro. We know how to load the image, crop the image to the size you like, how we can straighten the horizon. How to remove and change the backdrop, how we can enhance colors and brightness of your picture. How can we use the repair tool to delete some objects, unwanted objects from the picture as well, and at the end of the class, I also show you some extra stuff, how we can, for example, put your image into this circle that we see right now and we also explore some additional effects that you can learn more about going forward moving from basics to more advanced stuff. But everything we have learned so far should be really helpful for all of the basic photo editing needs. Okay, so now now is the time to prepare your project for sharing with us in the project gallery. So at some point we save our project. If you skip that step and you end up with having this project already cropped in into the circle, that's fine, as well. So you can just show this circular avatar like that. You can show the whole project with all of the enhancements we did, or you can go extra mile and actually show before and after. Let me show you how we can do just that. So now I got this one in the circle, but I got the original one just below, right? So what we need to do now, we need to use the crop to prepare a little bit of extra space next to it. So I can actually not only crop inside to make the image smaller, but I can crop outside to make it larger as well. Okay, I will click Apply and now we can load the original image. It should be here from our last lesson. But if you miss it, you can just drag and drop the original image once more. Here it is, and now I move it to the left so we can have it on the left before picture and after picture. Something like this. Nice. Let's zoom out a bit, so we can see both. And this can be your project submission, okay? As I mentioned, you can submit just the circle at of the image, you can submit the image. Without the circle and mask, or you can go extra mile and do some little composition like I just did with before and after, okay? So now we can save this by clicking File, Expot and going for PNG. Let's keep it. Around 75% of the original signs that should be big enough for posting on the web, and you can click Export. All right, so here it is. Feel free to rewatch any lessons that give you some troubles. You can try again. You can watch the whole process. You can try on different image to practice a bit more with this class. And when you are ready, please try your best to post the project in the project section so you can finish the class with a proper project. I hope it was helpful. I hope this will help you to explore more feature in the future and move from beginner to more advanced user as well. Thank you. For today, see you in the next one.