Mirror images are just plain cool. A mirror image of a person’s face can be completely mind-bending. A mirror image of a beautiful landscape can be doubly serene and pretty. You can make otherwise ordinary images surreal. Add a few more extra effects from Pixlr and you can create something truly magical. So let’s do that this week!
Each week, we challenge our community to make something new and different, and we feature the best on our social feeds and madewithpixlr.com. This challenge is all about bending Pixlr tools in an unexpected way to create a mirror image. You might not have ever thought to do this with the collage option, but we hope after trying it you’ll be sold on this kind of experimentation. Tag your photos with both tags #pixlr #mirrorimage, and we’ll find them on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. We’ll feature the best through Sunday, with a whole lot of good feelings from the Pixlr community: crazy emojis, thumbs ups, congratulations, and massive amounts of Likes. So how does it work? Follow these simple steps….
Start with a 2-photo collage
The collage option in Pixlr mobile and web gives you upwards of 25 collage formats. For this challenge, you’ll want to choose the 2-photo option. There is a horizontal and vertical 2-photo option, and you can use either one. If your goal is to create a square image (which is our goal this week), it really doesn’t matter which one you choose. We used the horizontal side-by-side option. Upload the same image to each empty collage box.
Flip one of your images
After you’ve added your two images, you’re going to flip one of them so that it faces the opposite direction from the first photo. You can do this by clicking on the edit icon in the upper-right-hand area. This will open up the image separately so you can edit it as you would any other image in Pixlr. Simply choose Adjustments > Rotate and flip your photo horizontally by choosing the left-right arrow.
Click Apply and then click Save. You will see your collage now has two opposing photos:
Squeeze your photo into a square
Here’s the neat part about this technique. You’re going to alter the collage settings so that your collage has no space between the images and ends up being square. You can do this by setting Spacing = 0 and Proportions = 0. Just set everything to zero. Your collage images will be set into a square. If you’re using the mobile version of Pixlr, simply choose a 1:1 ratio.
Artfully arrange your mirror images
The final step is to move your images around until you’re happy with their positioning. There isn’t a science to this. It’s all about experimenting to get the best reflection. If your original image was extremely horizontal or extremely vertical, you might lose more of the original image, but you’ll just about always end up with something interesting. Once you click Finished, you’re image will be taken out of collage mode. But that doesn’t mean you have to stop. We added some canvas effect and a neat border.
You can add other effects if you like, as we did with the spaced-out image of the Golden Gate Bridge. A bit of space effects (partially brushed out with the History Brush) and some color saturation and a border — and you’ve got a very unique, cool, mirror image photo.