Pixelmator practise

In order to find out what effects are avaliable for my digipak i produced this practise picture with a few different effects that i may be able to work with. Below i have a few screenshots of how i managed to do the different effects.

 First i had to work out what size i wanted my practise to be, for the digipak i'll make it 16cm by 16 cm however for my practise piece i made the page the size of A4.

 In order to make this picture the background i dragged the picture from my desktop onto the programme and stretched it so it filled the whole page.

 I wanted to try and cut the image so that the girl and the balloons were the only part left. This is something i might do for my digipak so i used this practise to ensure i found the easiest method to do this. The first technique i tried was the Eraser Tool. This too a very long time as i had to make sure i didn't go over the lines and that it was all kept neat. It took a while and it also isn't as neat as id hoped so i won't be using this tool for my digipak.

 I wanted to try putting a filter on one of the pictures. So for the picture in the upper right i put a Sepia filter on it. The scale in the screenshot gives me the chance to increase the intensity of the colour or make it less obvious. This is something i'm very likely to use as i want to keep the pictures with a warm tone.

 I used the Quick Selection Tool to try a different method for cutting around a picture. This tool was a lot quicker and kept the image much neater than the previous tool so this is the tool i'll use for my digipak if i wish to do this.

 In the top image i used the Warp Tool to just try out what it does. It allowed me to stretch the image out of place. This isn't something i'd want in my digipak however i wanted to give it a try to practise.

 I tried out the Blur Tool and it allowed me to change the intensity of how blurry i want the picture. I may use this in my digipak but only maybe for the background of a picture.






 Finally i tried out another filter on a picture. The filter is called Nebula and i feel like it would really work well on my digipak as its a very warm tone.









Finally i practised saving my work and making sure i knew how to save it as a JPEG image in order to be able to put it on my blog once it's done.