Intro to graphic design in Pixlr E

1. Intro: If you have any interest, any interest at all in graphic design, you've probably had multiple people recommend that you get Photoshop. Now, I'm not gonna lie to you. Photoshop is an awesome program. It will be able to handle all your graphic design needs, especially when combined with the rest of the Adobe package. The only problem is that it costs. Yeah. That's a lot of money. Now you're probably wishing that there is some kind of free alternative out there. Luckily, there is pixel blur. Now, Pixlr has two version. Pixlr X, which is extremely simple, very straightforward, and I don't think you need a tutorial for it because that's how simple. But it's very limited in what it can do. There's also the more advanced pixel or E, which pretty much just happens to be Photoshop light. So if you want something that's almost like Photoshop and it's free, let's give pixel blurry a shot. 2. Pros and Cons: Okay, so time to discuss the pros and cons. The pros are that it's relatively easy to pick up. The fact that there is a few less effects than in Photoshop does kinda work in its favor. If you're completely new because you'll be less overwhelmed. You'll have less information coming at you and remember, everything is gonna be a lot easier. Second, that I already mentioned, it's free. And for something that's just for free on the internet, it's actually quite impressive. It's better than just any of those free ones online that are, let's face it, most people use them for memes. Let's be honest. And it does have a lot of the effects in Photoshop, such as a clone to all the wand, lasso, focus, blur, lot of gradients stuff, a lot of stuff that's not even in more advanced stuff like Canva, let alone some of those things that are basically just used for means. Now the cons, simply, it's just not as advanced as Photoshop. Photoshop has a lot of features that Photoshop does have. Some features that pixel or E doesn't have. And again, if you already have Photoshop, best, you just keep using that because well, you're already paying for something that's better. But if you're wondering, if is Photoshop right for me, then you can pretty much just use pixel or e as a stepping stone. There's nothing even download. So that's a pretty big pro as well. But yeah, if you're looking to step into Photoshop, but haven't gotten to it yet, or you're curious about it, or you just want a free alternative. Pixlr E, great for you. 3. Main Tutorial: Alright, so let's basically just go through the basic pixel or a tutorial. Now first we have to actually get to the site. So pixlr, then Pixlr pixels, each pixel or x is a very, very basic one. But I don t think you really need a tutorial for that. It's if you'll learn how to use everything in pixel or e, you should learn how to use Pixlr X. So pixel array. Now we could create a new image which just gives us a blank one and it shows you all these sizes. Again, photo size is you can create one that's perfect for Instagram or Facebook, or YouTube profile, YouTube thumbnail, et cetera. Just have stuff that's ready to be printed on the spot. Or a, you could also open an image from your own computer. So let's load this sunset. Start playing with that. Let's go to the default size. Applying. We have our, we have our sunset right here. Now, as you can see here, it's locked. We can click the lock to unlocking which point we can use our first tool, the mouse tool to simply move it around, like drag and drop. We, this is fun. And now centric move it around a lot. You can see our history here. That's a lot of moving. We can either go to Edit, undo or you can also control Z. Just Control zed to make this go back quick as possible right there. And you can also press this eyeball to make it visible or invisible. You can also select stuff that's square and then replace it. And you can press Delete on your keyboard to just cut out everything that's out there. And you can also go to Select, de-select to get rid of it. Or you can invert selection tool and select everything except the square. Now if I delete and delete everything except the square, you can see this line around shows that everything is selected and this here shows the limits of the selection. Instead we can also undo, go back. So it's just this square selected and we can add that. Now this whole area is selected. And also switch to a circle. There we go. Also remove. We can remove a circle from there. And we have our new shape. Again go to new selection rectangle, and we have just that select, de-select. You have a lasso which has a few different options of how to select something more customizable than just a square or circle. First one, this one is just a free hand to do it do, and I just drew whatever this. Again, I can add to the selection by that. Also add that circle there. And let's even get that little bit there or subtract from it with drawing that circle there. Now let's go to New Selection. Polygon. You can make, for example, a triangle. There we go, it's all highlighted or a pentagon. And again you still have the add, remove, et cetera. It also bizarre Euler, which lets you make custom curves such as that. There's also magnetic, which is kind of it's own thing as well. As you can see, it'll kind of attach itself to some of the lines there. Now let's let go. There we go. Now de-select. Now there's the magic wand, which will get everything that's a certain color. So let's say I want to get this layer of mountains there. They'll get that it can also get the sky, can also get the darker stuff there. Again, you can de-select, add to the selection. Works usually by color, but you do have to play with it a fair bit. Let's de-select all that and crop stuff. Now again, if we want to get rid of that and that apply lot smaller and you've gotten just this bottom right corner. We can undo that. Again. We can also just ratio would make it a square instead of a rectangle. We can also cut certain stuff out, which means now we've got to select this layer so that there's actually something selected. And we can either have it set to just leave this part, that part, or if you want to cut every or if you want to just cut that out. Do that. And again, you can use go up here. Magic mess. Draw a mask, can do all sorts of stuff. They're just erase stuff, lasso mask, and there's also the gradient. This one is pretty cool right there. So you can start here, Abbott all the stay and then have this part faded. Which is really cool when you can bring in stuff. You go to this plus here at an image and you can bring something else. Then let's have this guy given the thumbs up. Now. Let's take all our mask stuff. Radical part there. And now that looks like something that would be in a movie poster where you can only really see part of the character and the rest is gradient of that. Now you can also make him invisible, which keeps him still use part of the image is just not visible, or you can also just click Delete to delete it. Now, Liquify, Let's actually take our guy with the thumbs up, bring him back. Now let's zoom in on him. You can do that with a little ball on your mouse, or you can also just view, zoom in, zoom out. So now we have sums up guys selected and pushing stuff that way. Or that way can also Liquify to enlarge. You can see putting it there. It makes it look like he's opening his mouth to ungodly levels, shrink and shrink his forehead. Swirl right? It should. Shirt there. Swore left. Same thing the other way around. If we want to redo all of that, we can just go to restore and go over the parts we want to restore back to their default and look good as new. And also something cool you can do with the selection stuff here. You can go to one select and then click outside of our guy giving the thumbs up there. Then go to background and then select invert. So everything on the background image behind the guy giving the thumbs up is selected. Go to Delete. Now make guy invisible and look. We got ourselves a thumbs up man shaped hole in our background. We don't want that. We want to be able to just see normally. So let's get rid of that for now. But that's a, it's a cool thing you can do. Now let's also go on to healing. To do that, we'll need a different image. Let's just say this picture of a beach here. Now. Healon, you see, let's say I don't want these little dark brown lumps here. I can just take the healing thing, click over them and good. Let's say I want this to be flat. There we go. It's again, you can get rid of just some annoying stuff in the background. That's good for if a person has pimples or something. And you want to just get rid of those, that's good. You can also make a beach ball. One color extremely slowly, but it works. And also by moving right now the beaches on top of our sunset. We can move the sunset on top of the beach. And now if we do the same thing with our thumbs-up guy, inverse the selection. So we're letting him again. Background clear, make the guy invisible. You can see the beach in the background there. There's a few ways that you can use that in natural application. But now let's, Let's get rid of our thumbs-up guy. Move our beach back on top and actually just get rid of the beach now. Blur Sharpen. So let's bring back our thumbs-up guy. Bring him back. And again, you can heel and liquefy again just a lot of bad. Okay, so now let's move on to the clone stamp tool. So let's, so right now we're set to source so it will copy the sun there. Now it'll paint. It'll paint the sun wherever I put it. Right there. As you can see, we now have two sides. We've turned the Earth into basically tattered see right there and then edit, undo. We want to paint more this tree area with the sun. We can do that. And if you want to copy the tree area, we click Source there, go there. And now we have the trees randomly in the sky for some reason. There's also blur sharpen. So let's bring back Mr. thumbs up. Now we select thumbs up dying and we can either make his face blurry, undo, sharpen it to make the features more visible. Or we can smudge his face. And that's basically that. Now these two are part of the premier. That's what you have to pay for. So I won't be showing them, but I will just be giving you the gist fo. Focus is basically just create some depth. Make it look more 3D. Disburse is make it look like it's been fanno snapped away. As you can see there the cherries are like, Please don't let me go in. You can dog burn, lighten, darken. So let's bring back Mr. thumbs up. Excuse me. Now we can lighten. And as you can see right now, we're lightening his shirt and his paint just a little bit. Can also just undo, darken and now everything slightly darker. Go back. And again, you can also work with shadows and highlights. Which again, it's just a lot of playing around bluffs. So much of this is trial and error. I know I have to see I even had to do some trial and error with some of these effects to show you guys really well, start with now let's eliminate thumbs up guy, sponge and color. Now we can increase the vibrance. You can see more vibrant. And again, we can adjust the size of this brush here. We can do that for most effects actually. Again, it just a strength so it increases the vibrance, buy more and we can also increase the saturation, increase the temperature, give it a warmer color, and do all that. And you can also do the opposite. You can decrease the vibrance, decrease the saturation, and make it undo, undo, undo. Now the pen tool, very simple. You can see the color there, yellow. And we have yellow. You can adjust that color to whatever you want. Let's say we want some blue. Add blue with the pen can increase the size. There we go. Decrease the opacity so that it's somewhat see-through, more so translucent. There we go. Just because of the way the colors mix that made a bit of a purple. So let's go all the way back. There's also draw, which is a lot more straightforward. Let's decrease the size of the brush there. And again, adjust the opacity. You can make it so it's a little bit scattered, which as you can see it kind of affecting the dots. Let's bring the size of this a little so you can, and more we go, you should be able to see scatter versus without scatter. Go back. Eraser, pretty self-explanatory there. You can just erase stuff here. If we bring in the guy giving the thumbs up, select his part, we can erase that. If we select the background behind him. So always make sure I have the right layer selected. Very important. Replace Let's say you want to replace something on Mr. thumbs up with blue. We can do that. And even Let's see what we did there. We just replaced since originally we had the background selected, we were able to replace a lot of that that just with some blue that was by accident actually fill, just can dump the selected color here, blue over whatever color it is your cursor is over, can also switch the colors now. It's gray. So if you want to go back and forth between two colors, you can just have them selected there. There's also the gradient tool, which can be done in either a linear fashion. Once again, you can adjust the opacity as you can see there. It's blue and white, so it'll just give a blue white overlay to everything. Can also have a radical, which means where you start clicking this the center of the circle, and then it goes out. And another thing that's really cool is you can go to this one here, which is black and blank. And as you can see here, this part is completely faded out because of the blank. You can see that's partially because it was radical. Let's go to linear seas. Again, stuffs faded out. You can use that for some cool stuff. There's also framing. This is often used for measurements. You can adjust the shape of the frame. Be all like that. Again, have it be different styles. Can also do very similar stuff with the shapes tool, rectangle, rounded rectangle. As you see you can rounded rectangles, circle line, custom, just add in a line, adding circles or custom witches. And there's lots of death. This, you can have it be a squat tree thing. I'll move it so it's a little bit easier to see. Make it be basically a plus or medical sign there. Different versions of stars, explosions, almost that fire or I guess it will look like a head proper shape. There's lots of stuff. You can also just add text. Hello there. Welcome to this tutorial. Just do that by typing. You can also sample, let's say, the sun and you see how this is bluey hair. You can make stuff the same color as the sun. Also, you can zoom in or go to minus zoom out just by clicking. And you can also adjust how you see stuff. So you can just basically your viewpoint. And that's the basics of how to use pig slurry. Again, once you go more in depth with stuff, there is stuff again, you can the page size. Right now it's this size. Let's say you go to the left, one or just the width, make it longer. You can have this be at the left there. Layer again, you can add a new layer. You can duplicate a layer which can be used for some creative stuff. And again, you can have some filters, but yeah, this, this is the absolute basics of pixel array. Now, we'll go on to our class projects. 4. Class Project: Now onto the class project. For the class project, you will be creating a design on Pixlr ie that uses at least five of the effects covered in this tutorial. Please make sure that you submit both the file of the design that you made as well as a file that shows what affects you used. That file. The file showing the effects of use can just be a Word document or something very simple like that. And the design that you made should be either a JPEG or a PNG file. That thank you for taking my course. I hope you enjoyed it.