How To Create Alternate Versions Of Big Sur's Desktop Background

If you don't like the colors or brightness of the macOS Big Sur default desktop wallpaper, you can create your own. It is easy to take the default image and tint it to your own color or even add more to the design.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with macmost.com. Today let me show you how to create your own custom version of the Big Sur wallpaper. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 800 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
Now people have different reactions to the default Big Sur background. It's bright and colorful and kind of matches what you see in iOS as well. But some people would rather it not be so bright or maybe just be a single color with different shades. We can easily customize and create your own version of this wallpaper and you can keep the light and dark mode functionality as well. So first let's start by finding the actual desktop wallpaper file. To do that in the finder create a New Finder window and we're going to navigate using the Go menu to the computer level. From there we're going to go into your main hard drive and then into System and then Library. So it's important you're in System Library not just library. Under here you'll find a folder called Desktop Pictures and this is where all the default system desktop wallpapers are stored. The one we're looking for is called Big Sur Graphic and we're going to copy this by going to Edit and then Copy or just Command C. We can't change the one in the System folder and we really don't want to. We want to have that one to go back to just in case. So let's go now and create a new Tab here in the Finder so we can go to a new location.
Here I am in my documents folder and that would be actually a good place to store our custom version but instead I'm going to use Go and go to Home and then go into the Pictures folder. That might even be a better place. Here I'm going to create a new folder and I'm going to call this Desktop Pictures and I'm going to Paste a copy of this file in here. So Edit, Paste Item. Now we can see a copy of the default background. Now if I double clicked on it to open it up it's actually going to open it up in a third-party graphics app that I have installed which isn't going to work because this file actually contains two images the light mode and the dark mode. So I'm instead going to Control click on it and then choose Open With and then Preview. So just using the Preview app that's built into your Mac already. Here we can see that there are indeed two images in this one file, the light version and the dark version. So let's start with the light version. Here I'm going to use the minus button a couple times so I can shrink it and see its edges a little easier.
Now let's go and alter this. So I'm going to use Tools and then Adjust Color and this brings up some color adjustment tools built into the Preview app. Now anyone of these can be used to adjust the colors here. The one I'm going to use right now is Saturation. I'm going to desaturate this. Basically turn it into a grayscale image. So I still have the light and darks but the colors are gone. Now I could simply go and use Tint now to tint it make it a green version or a purple version. I could even then change the temperature so change purple to red or to blue. So using these two controls you can actually do a lot to change the color but I'm going to show you a different technique that'll more easily get to the exact color that you want. So with it desaturated all the way down i'm going to close this window here. Then I'm going to go to the Markup Tools if I don't already see them there. If you don't see these markup tools click this button here to get to them. Now I 'm going to create a rectangle that's going to put this rectangle here. I'm going to alter the rectangle clicking here to set the Fill to a color. So I'm going to choose a blue color like that. Then I'm going to take the border away. So I'm going to click here and then click here to remove the border. Now let's go and alter the color a little more. I'm going to click here and then Show Colors. Then using the Color Wheel here I can adjust the color a little more to get it to what I want but also I'm going to take the Opacity and drop that down. Let's drop it down to something like maybe 40%. Now you can see how this acts as a tint to tint the background there. I'm going to drag this so it's above the upper left hand corner and drag the corner so it's below the bottom right. Now you can see how it tints the entire thing. I can continue to play with the colors here, work in the color wheel, and get exactly what i want. So I've got something like that that's kind of like a light blue.
Now let's go to the dark version here and then go to Tools, Adjust Color and drop the Saturation down and now I'm going to create a rectangle, just like I did before, and you can see it remembers the previous settings which makes it really easy. Now I could add this here. So now I've got my dark version and the light version. So if these are what I want now I can just Save and Close this. So now you can see back in the Finder here I've got my customized version. Let's name it something a little different. I'm going to call it Custom, so it's Big Sur Custom. Now let's use that as desktop background. All we need to do for that is go to System Preferences, Desktop and Screen Saver and then I just can drag this into here and now it sets that as my background. So now you can see my desktop background is set to that. If I look at the dark mode version you can see here using Control Center I can switch to dark mode and you can see I get that other version there.
Now note that when we open this up again in Preview the changes we've made have been permanently applied so there's no more floating rectangle above this. It's actually applied to the image itself. So if we wanted to create another one we would have to start over again and grab that original graphic image. There are other things we can do with this as well. For instance maybe we want to put some sort of graphic over this. One way to do that would be to use Keynote. So in Keynote create a new document and choose something like the basic white. I'm going to select everything here and get rid of all that text. Now let's add a shape. I'll click here and then I'll find a shape. Let's use Nature and maybe select this plant right here. I'm going to make it a lot larger and just put it right here in the middle and now I'm going to set its color. So I'm going to click here to open up the colors. Let's pick some sort of dark blue but let's set it to 50 opacity right there. Now I want to copy this. I find it helps if you click off of it first and then click it to select again and then go Edit copy. Then let's switch back to Preview and I'm going to Command V to Paste it in and you can see it pastes in right there. Let's get it nice and centered like that and I could resize it if I wanted to. Let's go now and Save this and now we'll set the desktop background again System Preferences Desktop and Screen Saver. We can see it already shows the new copy because we've updated the file it's referring to but the desktop doesn't update right away so one thing you can do is just switch to another desktop like this one and then switch to your new desktop and now will see the change applied. Now you could paste anything you want in here. So if you find a semi-transparent image online you can paste that in there If you've got a company or personal logo you can paste that in there as well. You can actually just paste a large image completely over this and replace both the light and dark mode with different versions of that image. Note that if I do command i here I can see that this is a 6016 square image. So if you're creating something in a graphics app make sure you create it that size for the best quality. 
So now you can get creative and create your own version of Apple's Big Sur desktop background or create something completely new from scratch

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Create Alternate Versions Of Big Sur's Desktop Background”

Braden

3 years ago

So this works for Light Mode and Dark Mode, is there a way to do the same thing, but with the Dynamic pictures? Or does the system just automatically make them dynamic if there are more than 5 parts to the graphic?

Gary Rosenzweig

Braden: Dynamic desktops are more complex. There are apps in the Mac App Store that will allow you to compile them if you really want to make those.

Comments Closed.

How To Create Alternate Versions Of Big Sur's Desktop Background

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Create Alternate Versions Of Big Sur's Desktop Background”

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