PIXLR Tutorial - Designed for Beginners

hi there I'm Jamie Keats and welcome to teachers tech hope everyone's having a great day today I want to kind of show you Pixlr is one of my favorite free graphics app to me it reminds me of using Photoshop about ten years ago it has a lot of the similarities with the tools how they look I like it how I can work with green-screen to do to take some pictures put it on transparent backgrounds and superimpose them so it's a great I think all-around app for personally use or school use so I'm going to walk through kind of just an overview of this but if you want more specific tutorials look at the top right in the cards and I'll make different ones that will get into the tools a little bit more check the description down below so I hope you like this let's get started on this date and remember I do these weekly tech tips and if you like what you see please subscribe to my channel

so there's a couple different ways you can get to Pixlr the one I'm gonna be showing you today is just using Pixlr comm as you can see in the URL that I have I just type that in and you'll go to it the other way and I'll do it at the end of this video if you're interested you can actually in your Google Drive you can put it to connect with see I have the Pixlr editor here I like to do that because then I can save everything to my Google Drive I'll be showing you how to save in the desktop in the free version but stick around to the end to find out how to do that so Pixlr if you come to the Pixlr page you might think well there's nothing there but all you need to do is scroll down or hit the arrow at the bottom and you'll get ready to launch your picture I'd launch your app so this is the one I'm going to be working with today it is the Pixlr editor so I'm just going to go ahead and launch the web app here so it opens up fairly quick quickly and the one thing you'll notice right away is there they do have ads in this so this is one of the reasons they can keep this free but as a compared to in the intro this really reminds me a lot of Photoshop how it used to be of course Photoshop is more powerful than this but the way it's set up if you understand Photoshop and looking for a free alternative look this way so in this example today I'm going to kind of be showing two of these I'm going to create a new image from scratch and I'm also going to open an image on my computer to show you how it works you can also take a URL from an image and just paste it in it's going to grab it from there and if you sign in you can open images and create a free account you can open it from Pixlr I don't have an account I just usually use it from my Google Drive but you can go ahead and check that out so let's get started with just creating a new image here so I'm just going to click on create a new image and first of all right away you can see you can give it a name so I'm just going to call this example here and it would have presets so this is dealing with pixels here 800 by 600 I can choose different ones you can see that it kind of gives you if you know what you're going to be working with do you want a banner do you want something depending on the size and width you can go kind of go through a list of what they already have for this one you can always adjust it after so I'm just gonna go with the 800 by 600 here transparent background this is what I like about this program a lot of programs make you pay to use the transparency but if you want to transparent background meaning that if you're putting a picture on something and you don't want all that white around it you can select a transparent background and save it as a PNG and it will work great for you I'm just gonna

go ahead and hit OK on this so I can start creating some art and the first tool I'm going to show you is the brush tool is right here and I'm just gonna go ahead and drag over here you can see I have a circle selected and dragged across and I have I just made a line with my brush tool just to step backwards I'm just going to show you how to zoom in and zoom out so if you wanted to change when you're working on and how large it looks and so in my case I can go up to view up here and zoom in you can see the shortcut is also there if I do the ctrl + I can zoom in and I also have a magnifying glass down here if I just hover over it you can see the bless it + click but if I hold shift down it turns to a minus and I can click and go out is a quick way to zoom it up and back and forth on an object because I can click on a certain part and if I click on it will just zoom up on it so very quickly and I'll just leave it like this in this example so the brush tool what I like to do is show you the different customizations first so color always an important thing when choosing your different but to make something and more attractive so I'm just gonna go ahead and click on this right here and I get this to open and I

can select millions of colors I you can see from the top I can go from HSL RGB web imaging on this one but I'm just going to leave it at HSL here so for example if I wanted a blue I could click on this blue and then inside here select another area of blue that I would like so I'm just gonna click here and then hit okay so now as I go through you can see I have a new color now what I really like is how you can customize the brushes if you go up to the top here I'm just gonna do this drop-down and you can see I can quickly change the size so maybe I wanted something smaller I have a smaller brush now if I go back I can change these are presets too I can change how soft the edges are on it and I can even pick an image if I want to draw with so if I wanted to draw with this star I can go ahead one thing to note is anytime you do something up just like a lot of programs there is an undo so we also have a racer but always remember that control Zed or control Z or undo is there to quickly get rid of your last step on it so let's go back to the brush again if we're looking at the brush you can see I have even different shapes a square and I can actually even customize my create my own brush with in my own image and draw with it so I could create it from like for an example a leaf and then draw with a leaf but I'll show you how to do that in another video like I said just take a look at the different cards of the different tutorials I have in the top right hand corner or look down below in the description so another cool tool is the pencil tool so now if I click on the pencil tool you'll see me draw and it looks like kind of a like an ink well if you look at the settings up here if that's what it's set to right now so if I have ink you can see how I can change this if I want it sketchy and it gives that sketchy look to it I can quickly change my color again of different things if I wanted that to be in a different color so again you can see if a person's artistic or even if you're not you can create some amazing drawings with this program so another thing to point out I mentioned the undoing there is also the eraser here so the eraser allows you to quickly erase something and you can kind of you can get your eraser more detail to what you want and maybe you want softer edges to give something look or make things look more professional you can also customize your eraser on this too so go ahead and just start playing around playing with the brushes and the pencils and remember you also have edit undo or you have your eraser to make any change any mistakes that you might have made the other tool that I really like is the Paint Bucket so the Paint Bucket allows me to quickly almost like if I had a large kind of paint just drop it in it spreads out anywhere that's a similar color so if I click on the white and I have this color selected I'll just choose a different color here so it stands out I'll choose this right here this yellow and if I click it covers the whole thing with since I clicked on the white it changes everything to the white to the yellow if I clicked on the blue it would do it finds that similar color to replace the edges were a little bit different there so it didn't go all the different ways so there's some effects that you can do with the Paint Bucket on it so if you need to color something quickly in a hurry and it's all the same color use your Paint Bucket this tool right here the gradient tool is something I like to make some really neat graphics if you're working on maybe thumbnails on YouTube or maybe channel art or just making some neat posters this is a gradient tool so the gradient tool what it does is if I drag just hold down my mouse button in drag and create

a line it creates a gradient now right now you can see it's a circle I have it set to radial so maybe I want it as linear and if I drag it you can see how now it's a linear if I drag it longer it creates a different effect to it and I can change my angle and it creates again differently how I do this so I can look through the different ways different settings and this is where you just go through and play with these different things and then just seeing what it could what it can do for you so between selecting these then going up to the top and changing the settings you'll see in a hurry what you can do so what I also want to show you before I switch to the image 1 we also have our text in here so we can type things so if I just select my a here and select it and then we'll say L to say welcome and you can see I have different fonts that I can choose from I'm just gonna leave this I'll go with I'll just go with a simple one right here nice and thick I can change my color if I wanted like so and hit OK so you can add your fonts quickly to this another thing I wanted to show you this one the other thing you can add to this is shapes and I'm just going to go right to here my shapes tool if you want to add some you just can quickly click on it select it you have different properties that you can change up top you can see there's border size if I was selecting it again how it changes the luck with such a large border size we have our fill shape to change the color and we have different things that we can pick from the different shapes itself so now as I mentioned I'm gonna go over to an image that I'm going to open an image up right away so I'm gonna go back to file open image and this time I'm just grabbing it from my desktop here so I'm gonna open this one of my twins that I have that

we're doing a lot experimenting with some a wasp nest and I'm just gonna walk through some of the key features of the rest of the tools here and this is another thing if you have students again you're playing around with it so many different things this free program can do so the first one I want I would show you is I'm going to start with this rubber stamp tool right here so the ramp tool allows me to copy a certain area and I'm gonna have to hold down now I ctrl shift and click on a certain area so if I go over to Keegan's nose here and I hold ctrl shift and I click my mouse what I can do is actually create another keygen over here so I can duplicate make a copy right on the same image so I won't spend the whole time but I could take a noise from wrist preserve specific person or an eye and copy it right over to that point I could take one of these boss and copy it over also so moving on to the next tool and I'm gonna jump up for a second here and just talk about this one right here this magic wand tool allows me to select certain colors I'm going to actually do a different video on that one so again check the playlist up top in the cards because I want to work with some green screen and doing some superimposing and that's the same thing with the last Sewell effect that I'll show you too so in this one I'll just continue on down below this I already showed you the color replacement we're on these ones the blur tool so the blur tool if I click on it I can go over an area of a face so and you might not notice it right away but it will blur so I'm just gonna wriggle my mouse overtop of the face here and leave it the one thing and if I show you on the right hand side notice there's the history over here history you can go back in time to your previous step so if I click up the talk it's gonna go back to my original picture like so and if I go back it goes back to where I was so I'm just gonna add a little blur what I find sometimes is when I'm using the blur tool it doesn't immediately show right away and then I wait a few seconds and then it does show you can see with his face to his face there is getting to be a difference with the this one isn't as clear anymore so again opposite the blur tool would be the if I hover over any of these it shows exactly what it is this is the sharpen tool and this one down here is the smudge tool so it's easy to show on the graphics if I take this much tool and let's say I go to qui-gon's nose and I just grab it and I can stretch something out remember you can always undo I can just go back a step here and it's gone or I could do the edit undo or as I showed you in the different drawings before the different erasers but I like using the history of this one this is a sponge tool this is for desaturation of a certain part I'm not going to be using this one I don't have it set up for this so I'm just gonna go on I can talk about that in a different video this is a Dodge tool here so it darkens some light in certain areas so if I click on it again I'll just use his face so maybe I want that a little bit later on it you can see how it adjust it there this one hover over you can see this one is the burn tool red eye so if you need to get rid of the red I don't have any red eye in this picture you can get rid of it I like this tool the spot heal tool so if there's a blemish on a face or a star cut I could get rid of it but I can also get rid of things right on this so if I show you me PA don't want see this right here I'm just gonna click on this here a few times and it's gonna be gone and remember this is a free program just it does many of the things that Photoshop can do if I want this wasp gun click on it it's gone this one gone so very easy to fix if you're fixing blemishes on the face think about using this program if you don't have Photoshop we have our bloat tool so if I click on a face for a bloat tool it pushes it out so the more I click on it but then the opposite fit is a pinch tool and I can go back and push everything in and we'll keep pinching it in and in so you can get some really neat effects on this I mean I showed you this before the eye dropper can grab colors from anywhere I showed you from the color select but the this one whether you using it on the drawing and you need a specific color you can pull a color outside of an image and then so if I was using my draw tool I can draw with that exact same color if I needed to add something or maybe if I was I wanted some text in it remember I can just use the text tool and right over top of this way to create a poster and if I wanted a specific color that was same in the background I could make sure I get it exactly that way too so remember the zoom tool as you go back and forth you can zoom up on certain areas there's so much to show you I'm just trying to show you some key things to get you playing around with this today a couple more things I want to show you we have our under our images maybe you want to adjust the size of your image so I'm going to click on this one and you can see the size of this image I can change the size and I want to click this to make sure I can stream proportions so it doesn't stretch it out with any funny way if you're changing size of the graphic I would I wouldn't try to make it larger because you're gonna get it all Pixley as it stretches it might you can make it smaller and it will stay maybe for a different format it whether you're putting into a document or web format to use so you can change your image size right through here and you can see how you can rotate your canvas and a couple other things here too I'm just gonna go over to filter and show you some neat things the filter can do if you wanted some neat effects just simply choose these here's the kaleidoscope and I can change this the different I can go over the different properties these two get the more specific - if you want it you can hit okay I'm gonna hit cancel just to show you some of the other ones here let's do the art poster and you can again play around with how specific you want everything you can inverse it to get a few different options so yeah between the filters and all the different other things you can be more specific on there's lots of things you can do to graphics remember the history to this if you ever need to go back and get the original picture again just scroll up through history and go back and take erased steps if you add new things on top of it remember you can you might be working with layers so you might need to check what layer you're on to add the effect to and they'll be right here and you just select them so I'm just gonna jump over to what I said at the beginning that was going to show you how to hook this to Google Drive how to add it as an app I hope you liked this interview sorry this overview today of Pixlr I'm gonna add as I said a lot more tutorials so check the cards to it to get more specific things the magic wand tool is a very cool tool to work with especially the green screen and I'm making some great effects with backgrounds so let's move over now to how to set this up with Google Drive I'm just inside my Google Drive and what I'm gonna do now is just go to where it says new and more and I'm going to connect more apps so at this point when I commit connect more apps I'm just going to type Pixlr in here and do a search and what I want is the Pixlr editor you can see there's Express but I was showing you the editor today so I'm just going to go ahead and connect this and make pixel of the default app sure that it can open and I hit okay so now when I go over to new you'll see that I actually have Pixlr editor hooked to my apps if you want to get rid of this if you didn't want it here anymore just go over to your settings and then go to settings here and over to manage apps and you can see scroll down and find it you have options here what you can do for it and you can disconnect it from drive if you don't want it there any longer so I'm going to see it done here so you can open it up right from here and it's going to open up and I'm going to connect it to a kit an account here and allow it to connect so I'm just gonna quickly open a create a new image and I'm just gonna I'll just draw something really quickly on it and when I save it this time notice it has a Google Drive option so I can save this one I'm just gonna call it test 1 and hit OK and the image is saved so if I go back over here I'm just gonna refresh this to make sure it was all there I can see if I scroll down here's test 1 it saved right to my drive on this one so I hope you like this kind of walkthrough of Pixlr today I was just trying to give an overview to get people using it something I show with my students as they said I'm gonna put more tutorials just look at the my cards and description down below in the playlists I have for this I want to grow this over time so people are more familiar with it I remember I'd do these weekly tech tips and just keep updated with different things check out my newsletter a teachers tech so I can connect with you a little bit more too thanks for watching this week and I'll see you now time