Shadows and Selections in Pixelmator

Courtney's Designs Validation kit

I've been thinking a lot about shadows lately in layouts and photos.  This one started with a photo I took of my feet on the sand (blissful spot!) and a photo of two pelicans overhead:

I adore, ADORE Pixelmator's magic wand selection tool.  It is so simple to use.  You can click and drag across a piece of a photo to select, and it does an amazing job selecting the item and detecting the right tolerance level, especially with the contrast like the photo above has.  I tried the same selection tool in Photoshop, and achieved results in Pixelmator faster.

 I wasn't worried about getting a little of the sky in with the birds in this instance.  After selecting both pelicans, I copied the selection and pasted it into the document I was already working on; the image of my feet and other scrapbook elements were already there.

Next, I added a Gaussian Blur to the pelican layer by dragging the Gaussian box on top of the document while the pelican layer was active.

After applying the blur, I added a color overlay to the layer using the Styles tool.  I used the color picker to sample the color of the sand and then made it darker.

Finally, I changed the blend mode of the layer to Linear Burn and reduced the opacity.

Scrapping with Pixelmator is a great alternative to using Photoshop.  Even without the same ability as Photoshop to break an effect off onto its own layer, Pixelmator still makes it easy to create great scrapbook pages.