I recently had an inquiry as to if I could colorize some of my design resources for a customer who does not have photoshop and does not use gimp. She stated that she’s using pixlr as an image editor and wasn’t sure if she could do this in pixlr. After giving it a whirl I decided to write a tutorial on it so users would know how to do it.
I wasn’t really picky about the colors used in this tut, I just picked them from the web palette color selector.
Resources Used:
Lace Borders No. 3
Label Frames No. 1
1. Go to pixlr.com and open Pixlr Editor.
2. Open the resource you wish to color. File>Open Image
3. Edit>Select All
4. Edit>Define Brush
At this point you may want to take note of the size of image you are working from. I used the original image size. To find this out go to Image>Image Size. There are different routes you can take at this step, depending on what resolution and image size you’d like your finished product to be. For now I’m going to just create an image that’s the same width as my brush, which is 2380 pixels. I’m going to create the new image taller than the original brush dimensions.
5. Create new image. You can fill it’s background at this point if you’d like.
6. Create a new layer inside your new image.
7. Select the brush tool.
8. Choose your brush
9. Choose the color you’d like your resource to be (color picker is the bottom tool in the tool palette on the left and stamp your brush where you’d like it placed your work file image. Make sure that image is selected by clicking on the black title bar.
10. At this point it would be a good idea to save your work. Go to File>Save. I’m going to save it to my computer and choose the format from the drop down menu as PXD which is a layered file. By choosing this format it will preserve the layers so I can go back and edit them again.
11. For the next part of this tutorial, I’m going to add a calligraphy frame over the lace. I’ve opened the white background of the frame.
12. Edit>Select All>Copy and then Paste in your work file. Make sure you have the layer selected by clicking on the select tool. (Cross shape with cursor pointer image in the top right of the tool menu)
13. So at this point my label frame background is quite a bit to large. The next step is Edit>Free Transform. Hold down the shift key while dragging any corner to make the image smaller while preserving it’s shape. Hit the enter key to complete your transformation.
14. For the next player of the frame, I’m going to open the black PNG layer and define it as a brush as done in steps 3 and 4.
15. This time I am going to stamp the brush on a new layer my frame image as it’s too big to stamp on my work file. (Pixlr’s brush resize tool appears to not display accurate pixel dimensions and behaves sort of wonky if the image is smaller than the actual brush.)
16. Hide your original black frame border then Edit>Select All and then paste into your work file. Pixlr will automatically create a new layer with the pasted image. You can then select Edit>Free Transform to and hold down the shift key while grabbing the corner to resize it. Hit the enter key to complete your transformation.
I hope you have found this tutorial useful!
Resources:
http://blog.pixlr.com/
http://blog.pixlr.com/2010/04/custom-brushes.html
