Each month, we give our Essentials and Pro members a new content pack. It’s our way of saying thank you for being part of our core community of users. Last month it was the watery, shimmery Mermaid overly pack, which resulted in tons of #pixlr tagged images that we positively adored. This time around we have a cool overlay pack we’re calling Gibson, and you’ll find it in Pixlr Desktop (Mac/PC) and in Pixlr for mobile. It’s a pack of ten overlays that add moody textures and fractured geometric elements.
These overlays are bolder than most, and there are a few techniques we’ve already discovered that we really like. First, we love the flying bird silhouette overlays. The no-duh obvious way to use these is to place them in a landscape photo so they add a dramatic (but also possibly realistic) effect:
There are even more interesting ways to use these. One of our favorite overlays in this pack, Apocalypse, is also a bird silhouette overlay, but what if you put this into a close-up portrait? It adds an air of interior intrigue.
There are some bold effects like a very cool one called Alpha that sports a wolf emblem. We used a few different layers at varied opacities to edit this image of three friends before finally adding the wolf emblem:
Other options in this pack include fractured lines that are great for adding texture to backgrounds like the sky. In the previous image, we let the overlays cover the entire image, but for this one, we used the History Brush to paint out some of the effects so that the effects look like they sit behind the couple. The History Brush is very handy if you like to layer on a lot of effects in subtle ways like this:
This week’s challenge: #pixlrgibson
Whenever we release a new content pack for our members — well you bet we want to see what people make with it. So this week’s challenge will be all about this new Gibson content pack. Edit your images and tag them #pixlrgibson on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. We’ll scour the Internet looking for the best images and share them on our social media channels, garnering you Internet fame and lots of love from the community.