Project: Creating a Photo Collage Template In Pixelmator Pro

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Watch as I create a photo collage template in Pixelmator Pro. 

So the idea here is to create a template in Pixelmator Pro that you can reuse to build collages. You'll be learning some skills about using layers and masking in Pixelmator Pro as well as creating a reusable template. Something that's not built into Pixelmator Pro.

We're going to start off here by creating a New Document. I'm going to create a custom-sized document here, just like this. I'll create it and it will give me a simple document with one layer here with just a big, white square there in the back. I'm going to start off by creating a different background instead of just this big white field here. So I'm going to use the Shape Tool here and create a rectangle shape. I'm going to set it just for just a regular Fill right here. I'm going to just fill the entire area with it, like that. Now that I've created that I can get rid of the image layer that's here. With it selected I can go to the Shape Tool again, make sure I have that selected, and you'll see the rectangle selected and I can change the Fill. Let's change it to a gradient instead. Let's make it a radial gradient, like that. Maybe let's change interior to black and say the exterior to like a dark gray. Just to have a background there. It may not be the best background but I want to demonstrate having a background back there. I'm going to lock this layer so we don't accidentally select it. So it's kind of locked back there right now and we can start creating the spots for photos to come in to fill this collage.

For those I'm also going to use rectangles although you don't have to. You can use any shape that you want. I'm going to use the rectangle shape here. Let's change the Fill before we draw it to a regular Color Fill, like this. Let's just draw a shape like that. I'm not really too concerned about the size of it when I draw it because I'm going to go here on the right and change its width and height. I'm going to make it 1200 pixels by 1200 pixels. A nice square there like that. If I select the Arrange Tools here I can drag it around. I can see it's 1200 x 1200. I can position it. Let's put this right in the middle. The idea is I want this to be a 3 x 3 collage. So there will be eight others surrounding this one in the center.

I've got this rectangle here and I want this to be more than just a photo that drops into this space. I want there to be a shadow behind it, and I want there to be a border around it. So, to do all of those I'm going to make four copies of this rectangle. Once I'm sure I've gotten it exactly like I want it. So with it selected I can go to Edit and then Duplicate or Shift Command D. So Shift Command D three times to get four total copies. The one at the back, that's going to be that shadow. The one at the top, that's going to be the border or frame. The next one down, that's going to be the photo itself and this extra one here, that's going to be the mask because I want to use a mask so that I can drop a photo in there that's not square and still be able to enlarge it, move it around, and it won't go outside of its boundaries.

If I had selected the photo layer here and used Mask With Shape rectangle it seems like that should do it but, in fact, what you need is a Clipping Mask instead. So we'll get to that in a minute.

First let's start with the Shadow. I'm going to turn all of these layers off so we can just see this one here. Let's zoom in so we can see it. I'm going to go to the Style Tools with the shadow shape selected and I'm going to add a new style for Drop Shadow. I'm going to make it a little blurrier, a little bit more distant, and let's set it to be 315 so it is pointing to the bottom right. So we've now have got a shadow under it. If I turn off the background rectangle you could see it a little bit better. The shadow that's under there. Look what happens if I switch it off and then I can switch it back on and you could see it there. So, we've got a shadow. I'm not worried about the fact that the shape here is just actually this blue color because it is going to be completely hidden by the photo itself. So we'll leave that as is and we'll go to the frame.

I'm going to make that visible here. For this I'm going to Add Style and add a stroke. I'm going to make this white, like that. I'm going to make it a little bit bigger so we can see it. You can start to see it there around the edge. I also want to set it so that it is outside of the actual image. So you can see it here. The frame, the border here or stoke as it is called is outside instead of centered or inside. So with it outside I do want to get rid of the Fill here because it would cover the photo that's underneath. So I will delete the Fill and just have that frame. If I actually got rid of that shadow you would see just the frame now. If I got rid of the frame and just had the shadow you would see the blue with the shadow underneath it. So we've got those two on.

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For the photo itself we want to make this a placeholder. We can't do that right now because if we go to Format and I use Advanced and Define as Placeholder you see that's grayed out. The reason for that is it is a shape. We can't make a shape a placeholder for an image. So, we'll just convert this to an image. I'm going to make it visible and I'm going to Control click, right click, or two-finger click to being up the Context Menu. I'm going to convert it to Pixels. So now that it is pixels I can go to Format, Advanced and define this as a placeholder. You can see it gets that nice little placeholder button there that I can click on to replace it with something very easily.

Now we want this mask to be applied to it. So however big this photo is, or however much we zoom into it and there's parts of it that are outside of the square it's going to stay within this other square, this mask. So what we're going to do is select the photo and bring up the Context Menu and say Create Clipping Mask. That will make the layer below it a mask for the photo. So now we've got something that's going to work. It's going to have a frame, it's going to have a shadow behind it, and the photo will be masked by this Clipping Mask underneath it. If we zoom back out we can see it is just sitting there right in the middle.

Let's go and have more of these. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to grab all four of these layers here. I'm going to group them. You can use Command G for that. It creates one group. Now I can duplicate these. I can use Edit and then Duplicate. But you can also Option Drag to duplicate something. So I'm going to Option Drag and it's going to create a duplicate of this group and I'll drop it right on top. Then I'll do the same thing and create another one. Then I'm going to select all three of these, Option Drag to the right, Option Drag to the left, and very quickly I've got nine. I'm going to select the top three and I'm going to use Shift and Up Arrow to move it up. Shift Down Arrow for the bottom three. Shift to the left and Shift to the right to separate these. How much it moves when you use Shift and then one of the arrow keys depends on how far you're zoomed in.

But this looks pretty good. This is what I want right here. Now I could have used different shapes. I could have made all squares and then redone all those earlier steps to make a circle photo here in the middle or maybe these four I could get rid of those and have just one bigger square there. Maybe these should;d be a very vertical photo and this should be a horizontal photo with just one image there. You can do it anyway you want.

I'm going to keep it very simple here. We're got a nice collage. Let's go and see it in action. You would think that there's a way to Save this so that it appears in the list of templates. But unfortunately Pixelmator Pro doesn't have that, unlike Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. However we can still create a template. Let's go and just Save it normally. So, File, Save. I'm going to save it to the Desktop and I'm going to call it Collage 3x3 Template. Save. Let's close that out. Here it is.

Now if I were to double click on this to open it and then start putting photos in here I'd be editing the Collage 3x3 Template. I don't want to do that. So what could I do? Well, one thing I could do is from here I could do File, Duplicate or hold the Option Key down and Save As and make a copy first. I could have just simply selected it here in the Finder and done File and then Duplicate. Made a second copy and started to work with that. But there's actually an age-old Finder technique for creating a template even when templates aren't available in the app. That's to select the file, use Command i for Get Info. Then look for Stationary Pad. It's under General so you may have to expand that section. Turn on Stationary Pad. What Stationary Pad does is when you double-click the file to open it, it will create a duplicate right then and there and open the duplicate. So watch what happens! When I double-click on it, you see I get Collage 3x3 Template copy. If you look here it created that copy. It only allowed me to open that copy, not the original. By the way, I can still go to File, Open and I can still open the original this way. So it is something to be aware of but also this is a handy way, then, to Edit the template for next time.

I'm going to stick with this copy that the Finder made and then passed along to Pixelmator Pro. Let's go ahead and use this template. I'm going to click the Plus button here and then it presents me with some choices. Replace from Photos. Replace from Files. I'll do Replace From Photos and I will select a photo like this one. It's going to then add it right in here. I can then easily go to the next one, click the Plus button there, Replace From Photos, and let's try a different one. Let's try this one here and now notice what it has done. Because it is square, but yet the photo is horizontal, it's cut me off. You can even see the dots here that the size of the photo is overlapping the edges on the left and right.

Now fortunately, since we used the Clipping Mask, we can adjust that. You want to select the photo layer itself so it helps to look in the Sidebar here and actually make sure you'll selecting the photo layer. Once you select the photo layer you can actually move it around very easily and you can see how it's still going to clip it off.So I can move it to the right here to get it like that. You can also do the same thing for zooming. For instance, let's add another one right here. Then let's add something here that we might want to zoom into. Like, for instance, this photo here. I'll bring that in and then if I again look here and select just the photo itself in the left sidebar. I can easily move this around but I can also drag the dots to enlarge it. It will still retain the frame, the shadow, all of that stuff very easily. Now I can just continue to add more here. I can also use Replace From Files. So instead of going to my photos collection I can very easily go and say select an image from my files, like that. I can continue to add more photos to the collage. There you go. I've completed my collage. I still see the Plus Buttons here allowing me to further replace any photos that I want to change. But any Exporting I'm going to do from this, you can see it's not going to include those.

Now when I Save this it's saving, of course, with this new name. I can easily also simply Rename this to whatever it is I want to save the Pixelmator Pro document. You can see I've got my Pixelmator Pro document right here and still my template for it right there.

So after trying this you may want to expand on it by using different shapes, even overlapping photos in the collage. Perhaps instead of having a shadow underneath, have an internal shadow to make it look like the photos are imbedded in the background. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.