Creating Simple Custom Desktop Wallpapers

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create your own custom Desktop wallpapers without having any special graphic skills or expensive third party apps. 

Often you see people share their Mac Desktops online and they look beautiful. If they are graphic professionals or photographers then they can simply use the graphics they have to have beautiful desktops with beautiful wallpapers. But anybody can actually do that. If you've taken more than a few photos, even with just your iPhone, you probably have some nice photos that will work well as a Desktop wallpaper and mean a lot more to you than something you might download online. 

So, for instance here, I've got the default Tahoe wallpaper here. I've got some widgets, some icons, and the Dock at the bottom. Let's say I want to make this look more like my Desktop by having a custom wallpaper. So, in my Photos Library here I've created an album and I've gathered together some photos that I think will work really well. This first one here is a landscape that I just took with my iPhone. I want to use this as the wallpaper. It is pretty simple to do that. All you need to do is bring up System Settings and then bring up Wallpaper. In addition to all the options that Apple gives you for wallpapering you can also just click Add Photos and then choose from Photos. I'm going to go to Collections here and go to that album I created. There's the photo. I'm going to select that and I'll make that my Desktop background. 

Now I've got options here for how it fills the screen. So I can have it Fit which means I'll get bars on either side because it's a narrower photo than the screen is. So Fill is probably what I want to use. Now this may not be the greatest Desktop wallpaper but it means something to me. It brings back a memory. It may even make me feel more relaxed, more motivated, more focused. If you use your own photo it could be a really good wallpaper for you even if others don't find it interesting. 

We can make changes to this wallpaper. But before we do let's make changes on how the widgets and icons in the Dock look to make it fit better with the wallpaper. So, if I go back into System Settings and I go to Appearance I can change how all these elements look. Right now they are just using all the default colors of the icons and widgets. So they are not reflecting, at all, what I'm seeing in my wallpaper. I can very easily change it using either either Clear or Tinted. If I switch to Tinted I can choose a color here. Select Choose Color and then I can use the Color Picker to pick a color. Maybe I'll try a dark green here and then I can adjust how well it blends in. Maybe that doesn't look that great so I'll try a blue here. Maybe I like that better and I can adjust how well that blends in and get something I want. Obviously it gets very easy to make something where the text gets hard to read. But maybe you don't really need to read the text. You're just glancing at a number here so it is not important. So adjust as you like with more or less contrast. Adjust the color as you like to make it look however you want. Sometimes a color that is not even present here can help these elements standout in a different way. So pick something that you like and don't worry about what anybody else might think.

Keep in mind you have the Light and Dark versions of those as well. So here the greens really didn't work out very well when I add Light chosen. But if I pick the greens now with Dark I like much better how it kind of blends into things. But another option is really simple. It is just to select Clear. You've got Clear Dark and also Clear Light. Clear Light really kind of fades these things into the background. Look at how the Dock looks now. Another advantage to Clear, as we're going to see here in a minute, is you can have multiple wallpapers on multiple Desktops and Clear will always just be clear, whereas a tinted color may only work with one of the images you've got as a wallpaper.  

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So let's address one issue here. That is that we're getting the center of the image. Let's say you wanted more of the sky and less of the foreground here. The way it cropped it doesn't give you any choice. But you do have a choice when you're in Photos. If I go back into Photos here and I look at this image again, I can go to Edit and then Crop and then Crop it. Let's crop it to something that actually fits the screen. So if I go to System Settings and then I look under Displays, I Control Click in-between one of these icons here that say Show List. I can see what my Display really is. So I'm set to 2560 by 1440. It's actually double that because it is a retina display. But I'm going to need the ratio. What I'm going to do here with cropping is use Custom and I'm going to enter in those numbers here. You're going to get a cropping that is the same ratio of the screen without loosing any pixels. It's still the same width but now I've got a little more Up and Down to work with. So I can bring it all the way down to get a lot more of the sky and then click Done. 

Now let's change the wallpaper here. I've changed the image but it is not updating. So let's go and re-add the photo. I'll choose it again the same way I chose it before. If I were to actually do it again it would see no change. It would think I'm choosing the same thing so no need to make any change. So I'm going to change it instead to another image and then I'm going to go back in and change it back to the image I actually want. This one. Now you can see the cropping is what I want. More of the sky and less of the foreground along the bottom. If I wanted to crop it in further, maybe to just get more of this area here, I can do that as well. 

The next thing you might want to change is the fact that there is a lot of color here. A lot of contrast. There's white and grays and dark blues, light blues, dark greens, light greens and that can really get in the way. You can see how these icons and widgets and things don't really stand out. It would be nice, say, if it was a black and white image. Let's go back into Photos here and I'm going to duplicate this photo. I don't really need to duplicate it because I can always refer back to the original. But it will be nicer here to have a simple set that I can switch back and forth with. Plus I'm going to create a second desktop. That way you can compare these and I'll need each image around, one for each Desktop.

So for this new version here I'm going to go to Edit and then I'm going to use Adjust and then I'm going to use Black & White Tools here. Any change to Black & White Tools will make it black and white. So you can work with the Intensity of neutrals and tones to get it what you want and then click Done. 

Let's go back here to the Desktop and I'm going to use Mission Control, Control Up Arrow, and I'm going to create a second Desktop by clicking the Plus Button here on the right and switch to that second Desktop. Now I'm going to change the wallpaper and I'm going to turn off Show On All Spaces. This allows me to have separate wallpapers on separate desktops. So now what I can do here is I can choose a different image. I'll go to Add Photos, Choose From Photos, and go to that collection. I'm going to choose that black and white version here, like that. So the key here, with the black and white version, would be now to go into System Settings again, and make all of the other elements pop-out by changing their appearance. I can go back to the defaults for these and have these all be colors. I can choose Dark if I want instead or I can go with Tinted here and then decide to choose any color I want. I can choose one of those defaults but also choose color here and just select something that I like, like choosing my favorite color and have it standout. Remember you get light and dark choices even after you tint. So if you like black and white photos and you have a favorite color this could be a good option for you. 

Now let's say you don't want to get rid of all the color completely but you do want to kind of have the background fade a little bit. So let's go in here again and make another Copy of this and with this one I'm going to go to Edit and Adjust. But I'm not going to use Black & White. Instead what I'm going to do is go to Color here and bring down the Saturation. You bring it all the way down you change it to black and white. But you can choose something in the middle there to leave a little bit of color in. You can also play around with the Vibrance as well and the cast to kind of make it warmer or cooler. I'm going to make it cooler like that and Done. So now I've got another version to choose from here. 

Let's go and create another desktop, a third one, and for this one here I'm going to change the wallpaper and select this new version, like that. Then here you may want to change the appearance back to Clear if you like. So now you see the advantage of Clear. I've got three desktops now. Each using a different wallpaper. But Clear works on each one of those. There's this one, and then there's this one right here. 

Now let's look at another way to take an image and make it into a really nice desktop wallpaper. Let's go and look at this one. This has even more color than the other one. So it may not be a good desktop wallpaper. It could be too distracting. But if you go into Edit here it would be nice to be able to apply a specific color to it instead of playing with the Color Tools or using the Filters. You can if you're in Edit Mode you can click here. You have all of these third party extensions. But one that you'll always have is Markup. Markup Tools. Of course you can draw on this and add text on it and all of that. One of the things you can do here is add a rectangle. So I've added a rectangle here. I'm going to set the border to Nothing and I'm going to set the color, but instead of choosing one of these I'm going to choose Show Colors. This will bring up the Color Picker and I can choose the color I want using the Color Wheel. So let's choose something like this. But I'm going to change the Opacity to make it less than 100%. You can see how it is just tinting what's behind it. So now I could stretch this rectangle to cover everything. You can see how it is tinting the entire thing. So then I'll Save Changes and that's what it looks like now in my Photos Library. I've got it as a tinted photo. You can make it look old fashioned. You can mute the colors. That kind of thing. This creates a kind of a really nostalgic look but also the colors aren't as bright and distracting as they were in the original photo. By using different colors and making the opacity even darker you can even fade the image to just a shadow in the background. 

Now let's get away from using photos for a minute and let's go into Keynote. Keynote is a really handy graphics creation app. Of course it is meant as a presentation app but you can easily create a new document here, I'm going to select everything on the slide and get rid of it. I'm also going to go to Document and change the slide size to be the size of my Desktop. I want to do it at the full resolution. So for my screen it is twice what we saw earlier, 5120 by 2880. That's the exact number of pixels on my particular display. So now I've got this image that will be that size. So now I'm going to add a shape. I'm going to add a rectangle here and I'm going to fill the whole slide with this. Now I'm going to go to Format, Style and you can see I can easily color this in to create a big color styled graphic. But what what I want to do is go to Gradient Fill or even Advanced Gradient Fill, like this. You can click on either one of these two color chips here to change the color. So I can make this one something like yellow and then click on this one and make it something like an orange, like that. I can change the angle and make an angle like this. I can also click here to add another color. So I can choose something else there that's going to be in the middle between these two. So you can get creative like that. Create anything you want. Of course you'll probably put a lot more time into it to get something you think looks good. 

Not only that but you can duplicate this really easily and create a second one. So now I've got two of these. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to overlay this one here, change the angle like that, make sure it is perfectly on top and I'm going to make it semi-transparent by changing the opacity here. So you're basically blending the two together. So it is creating a more intricate pattern. So once you've created something that you like through a little bit more experimentation and work than what I've done here, all you need to do is to File and then Export to Images. Then you can export all the slides or if you're working with a group of slides for some experiments you can do a specific slide. You can do a PNG here to get the highest quality and then Save. Annoyingly Keynote always creates a folder and inside the folder is where it puts the image. So you probably want to move that somewhere else, like into my Pictures Folder for safe keeping. But for now I'm just going to take this and to assign a file as a Desktop Wallpaper all you need to do is Drag & Drop it onto this, like that. Now you can see I'm using that as my Desktop wallpaper. 

So I'm actually going to create a new slide here. Just a blank one and instead of using gradients this time I'm just going to create a new shape here that is a rectangle. Make that fit. Then I'm going to set this to a solid color. So I'm going to click here and take something like this blue here. Then maybe I can further adjust it. Let's desaturate it a bit and make it a nice light blue like that. Then I'm going to create some other shapes. I'm just going to keep it simple. Just a bunch of different circles. To keep circles circular I'm going to hold the Shift Key as a drag a corner to resize them. I'm going to take this one and I'm going to leave it as white but I'm going to set the opacity to less than 100%, like 50% here. I'm going to have one there, I'm going to option drag to create another one and I'm going to resize this with this one here. Option drag to create another one and resize this to make it really big and kind of half off and then the same thing here. Resize this one as well and maybe one more and make this one really huge but kind of off like that. Then kind of arrange these in some sort of nice pattern, like that. So now when I export and I just get that one image there and I'll Drag & Drop this here. Now I get a wallpaper that looks like this. With more effort and trying out different shapes and maybe trying out different amounts of opacity you can create something you like as well. 

Now as long as you have a fairly recent Mac with Apple Intelligence you have another app that you can use for free to create wallpaper. I'm not talking about using it from scratch. I'm talking about using your Photos. So I'm going to duplicate this photo here, the last one we used. I'm going to with this duplicate I'm going to go in and Revert to Original. Remember we tinted it using Markup. Now let's say I'm going to take this and I kind of want to filter it. I want to make it, maybe, to look like a painting. Now I'm going to go to Image and Edit With and then instead of choosing something like PhotoShop or something like that, I'm going to use Image Playground, which of course is part of Apple Intelligence. Now what is going to happen is it is going to bring that image into Image Playground and Apple is going to use its AI and apply one of its styles, like for instance one of its animation styles here. Now Apple's AI is going to very much reinterpret the image and its very limited styles. You may get something that you like and decide you want to use it. But what I'm going to suggest is you switch from this and go to ChatGPT and then you get to choose all these different ChatGPT styles. But don't even choose one of those. Leave it as Any Style and then you can actually prompt it here. So you can do something like impressionist painting. You can see the result here. I'm going to click Save. Once it is saved I can drag it out. So back in System Settings here I'll go to Wallpaper and I'll Drag & Drop this here. You can see it took my photo and it painted it. You can ask for something else like a renaissance style painting or a realistic type of painting or something else. Or name some artist and some styles and keep working with it to get what you want to take your photo and reinterpret it and make it a nice looking desktop wallpaper that while looking good still means something to you. 

So as you can see without any real graphic skills or apps, I've created some interesting desktop wallpapers from my photos and just from some patterns like this, this, this one, this one and this one. Try some of these ideas with your own photos or just by creating patterns in Keynote that you like. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.