Using the Pixelmator Pro Warp Tool

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new Warp feature in Pixelmator Pro. So the Warp feature is a new feature in Pixelmator Pro in version 4.0, which is part of Apple Creator Studio. You won't find the Warp feature in the standalone version of Pixelmator Pro. You have to have the Apple Creator Studio version. Basically, Warp is exactly like it sounds. It allows you to take a 2D image and then warp it by grabbing the corners or points inside it and either twisting them or stretching them. So as our first example, I just have a simple PNG image here as a layer in a Pixelmator Pro document. So nothing particularly special about this image here. To warp it, I can go to the Arrangement tool here and I can then click this Warp button at the bottom right. But I could also go to Edit and then Warp and you can see there's also a keyboard shortcut, just the letter J all by itself. You'll also find under Format, there is Warp and you can jump right into warping with one of the presets or using another feature if you like. This menu here would be very handy if there's a particular part of the Warp tool that you want to use a lot. You can assign your own keyboard shortcut to it using System Settings. So I'm going to just choose Edit Warp and now it's going to allow me to warp what I had selected. On the right here, it goes to the Warp tool and you could see there are 12 presets. So I could select one of these and it will warp the image according to the preset. So I can go through all of these and try them all out. I can then further adjust it by going down and looking under Distortion and there are a variety of different sliders. I can slide one of these to the left or the right to change how this preset looks. Like this. Some of the presets have Bend and if you drag that left or right, it'll change the bend. Some of the other presets, like for instance this one right here, not only have Bend but also Warp Orientation. So I can bend it this way or change the orientation to vertical and then bend it this way. In addition to the sliders, you also have these green dots that allow you to control the same things. So I can drag the green dot up or down like that. Grab either one of these. These just go vertically. They don't go side to side. If I change to something like this, you can see I get two green dots here. I could drag them vertically. But if I change the orientation, now I can drag them horizontally like that. If you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash patreon. Now, in addition to those presets and the sliders, you also can take the dots here that appear at all four corners. Grab one of those and drag and you can see how it warps the image here. In addition to the dots themselves, when you select one, you get the little control lines coming out of it. And you could grab and drag one of those as well to control the warp along that edge like this. You can add your own control dots here by clicking on one of these three buttons here. So if I click on the vertical one, I can add a vertical line which will create a dot at the top bottom. I can create a horizontal line. So a dot to the left or right and any intersections. I could also have just clicked on this button here and then added a dot in the middle, which also adds the dots along each side. So with these dots here, I can grab any one of them, drag it along, or drag one of the control lines that comes out of it to twist, turn, and stretch. Now, another thing you can do is you can click the more button here and you split into grid. You could do three by three, four by four, or five by five. So five by five is going to create this five by five grid of boxes with control points at every intersection. So now you can use that to warp it as you like. Now, if I were to choose one of these warps or any other way of warping it, I can also crop the warp. So right now you see how this graphic goes from edge to edge inside the warp. But if I click the more button here, I can set the content area and it's going to show me the content area flat. I could also turn that off and just see the warped area like that, but it helps to start off with this here. And then I could grab any of these edges and hold the option key and it will take the edge and the opposite edge and I could set the area for the warp. So this is going to warp this whole area out here with the actual image there in the middle. So now that's how it would look. Now you can warp it just about any kind of layer. So I'm going to, instead of using that graphic there, I'm going to take this image, just a regular photo that I've brought in as a layer, and I could apply the warp here. I'm going to use the J key to start the warp and I can warp it using, say, this button right here or this button or any of these and do all the same things to this image. Notice what happens when you add a warp. You get a warp group here. So you could see the image here is inside the warp group. I could drag other layers inside as well. So I'm going to drag this layer inside here, make it visible, and you could see how both of these are warped the same way inside this warp group. If I were to select the warp group now and edit the warp, change it to something else, everything inside will warp together. There's also this handy little button here, this plus button, you can click that and you can replace what's inside the warp. So if this image was like a placeholder for something, I can replace from a photo in my photos library from files, from an AI generated image or whatever I have copied to the clipboard. You can warp just about anything. I'm going to go to the shape tool here and I'm going to add a rounded rectangle shape. Just going to put it in here and I could warp that just with the J key here and select one of these and now I've got a warped rounded rectangle. I could create some text here and I could warp that just the same. Just the letter J there and now I can warp it or use one of these presets here to warp the text and of course you can combine these. Here's a rounded rectangle and then I'm going to create some text and then I'm going to group these two together. Command G will do that and I'm going to take this group, use J and now I can warp the group and I can still edit things. So I can still go into this warp group here and then select hello and then change it to something else. The text is just normal text but inside of the warp group it gets warped before you see it. Pixelmator Pro also allows you to add video. So I could take this video here and yeah you can warp it. Use J right here. Let's go ahead and warp it like that. And it works. It even will play while warped and if you export you can now export this as a video and it will be warped in the output. Now Pixelmator Pro 4 for Apple Creator Studio also comes with new templates called mock-ups. So if we go to mock-ups here and you could see there are things like hats and bottles and shirts and phones cans and the idea here is that these are using warps to wrap an image around something. So let's for instance use this can mock-up here and here's the can and you could see here in the layers there is a warp right here and it has the graphic in it. If I go and paste into the warp here you could see the MacMost logo appears in there. You turn off the rest of it and you could see the logo there on the can although the colors don't really work out very well. If instead I use this cap mock-up it looks a little better. I can paste into here or use the replace function like that and place the MacMost logo here on this warp. Get rid of the placeholder graphic like that. Here's some examples I've created from scratch. If I want to put this logo on the billboard it doesn't really work to just stick it there because the perspective is off but instead I can use warp to put it on there. So with it selected I'm going to use J to warp and I'm going to move the corners to the corners of this rectangular billboard here thus making the logo fit on it as it should except of course I'm stretching it. This is where the ability to set content area really comes in. I can option click and drag up to get this more square and you can see how it looks there on the billboard as I'm adjusting. I want to give it some room left and right as well like that and I can move this square around. It represents the area there on the billboard that I set up with the warp so I can get the logo just like I want in there and then I can click done and there it is. Now the great thing is that inside the warp group this is just a regular graphic and I could do things with it like for instance I can add a style and add a drop shadow to it to help make the logo stand out even though it's kind of white on white. Here's something a little tougher. I've got this crystal ball here and I just have this image that I want to place inside the crystal ball. I could just put it in there and kind of trim it around and everything but it wouldn't look like it's actually inside a crystal ball. It should be kind of curved, right? So let's go to warp here and let's use this warp right there and I can adjust with the little green dots and you can get to a point where it's almost round. It's only four dots so it can't be perfect ground but we can get close enough and then done and I can bring it down here and kind of try to position it right inside the crystal ball like that. Now it doesn't look perfect but it's going to look a lot better if I make it semi-transparent so we get some of the crystal ball and some of the image. It'll also look a lot better if I can kind of have it fade towards the edges so I could do that in the warp group by ctrl-clicking on it, right-clicking or two-finger clicking and I say I'm going to mask it with a shape. I'm going to mask it with an oval and I'm going to make it masked within the crystal ball. Now it already was circular so it's not going to be too much of a change right away but one of the things I could do is I could go to adjustments here and I could have it feather so more of a mask towards the edges like that. Now it's starting to look pretty good there. I can go even further with the mask here. I'll click on the more button here and I'll say refine mask and now I can actually draw on it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to subtract. I'm going to hold the option key down and subtract so it's not going to get as much of the bottom in there like that. I could also do like more along the sides like this. I can kind of paint in like that to get the mask to be even better. Now I've got my desired effect there. Looks pretty good with a little more time and refinement. It could look great and in the warp group here I can use the plus button to completely replace everything including the mask or I can just control click on this layer here and I could say that I want to replace the layer with a photo. I'll go to my photos library and it's keeping everything else the curve of the warp, the masking and all of that. Maybe what's most impressive about it is how well it works. It's very smooth and so far it's worked flawlessly with everything I've thrown at it. So if you have the new Pixelmator Pro for Apple Creator Studio give the warp tool a try. Thanks for watching. Want to know about every new MacMost video each week? Sign up for the absolutely free MacMost email newsletter at macmost.com newsletter