Page view:
Starting with a photo taken from an iPhone of a beach in Seattle, we're going to make a nifty little television effect. The image above is the result of this tutorial. If you find this tutorial too easy, theres a Medium and Hard one as well.
Start off by opening an image in acorn.
Its a good idea to choose File -> Save As and save your file somewhere. If you make changes and simply hit Save then you'll change the original file. Most likely not a good idea.
Select Tile Effects -> Perspective Tile The filter dialog box that pops up should look a little like the following image. If it doesnt, hit the triangle next to the Preview button in the bottom left to pull out the preview window. With this viewable we can move stuff around easily. When you hover over that area, you'll see small orange circles pop up that say "Perspective Tile Top Left" Move those around until you get something like this next picture.
If you're looking to move something back in space just like this, but so that it doesn't tile, choose Filter -> Geometry Adjustment -> Perspective Transform which will give you the same controls.
Heres what our image looks like so far.
Now we need to add some text on top of that. Grab the Text Tool and click and drag a box, starting from the upper left hand corner of the screen all the way down to the bottom right corner. Now type something in.
If you aren't happy with your font, feel free to change it. The text that you've written is in its own layer, which means that you can grab the Move Tool and drag it around. If you don't like where its sitting, feel free to move it. This also means you can be less careful when typing it in, because you can always come back and change it later.
Choose File -> Save or File -> Save As in order to save your file out. You'll get a dialog box asking if you want to flatten the file and save it to the original format. You're seeing this because JPEG and PNG files can't have multiple layers. If you choose to save out in one of these formats, you won't be able to come back and edit the file later, but you will be able to easily email and do other fun stuff to it. If you would like to maintain the layers so you can come back later and mess with them, save it as an Acorn format by choosing File -> Save As. Heres what the final product might look like:
Want to take it a step further? Try the Medium and Hard versions of this tutorial.
Back to Tips and Tricks -> Acorn