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Let's Watch Television - Medium
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 that its too hard, try the easy version. If its too easy, theres a harder one as well.
Start off by opening an image in acorn.
Next we're going to create a new layer in our project in order to make the bezel of the television. Press the plus button at the bottom of the layer list in order to create the new layer.
With the new layer selected, grab the Fill Tool
Make sure the foreground color is set to black and click anywhere on the canvas. You should see something like this:
Don't worry, the image of the trees is still there, its just behind the black. Lets poke a little hole through and see whats behind. Grab the rectangular selection tool and draw a box in the middle of the image.
Now hit the delete key. This will delete the black, and show you whats below it, the trees. We're going to take this hole and stretch it out, making it look like the bezel of a TV.
Clear the selection that you made by choosing Select -> Clear Selection Its important to do this before the next step.
Now go up to the menu and choose Filter -> Distortion Effect -> Bump Distortion We need to warp the square to make it look more like a TV.
The filter dialog box that pops up should look a little like this, 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 a small orange circle pop up that says "Bump Distortion Center". Take that and drag it into the center of the square we made.
Mess with the settings a bit to get it looking how you like.
When you're happy, press Apply.
We're getting closer. We now need to scale the black bezel a little. Choose Layer -> Transform Selection and move the corner points around a bit to scale the image up. If the corner points go outside of the window, click and drag on the middle of the image to move it around a bit. When you're done it should look a little like this.
Now that we've got it looking good, we need to merge the two layers together. Choose from the menu Layer -> Merge Down and the black bezel layer will merge with the tree layer.
With only one layer, we're going to go back into the filters menu and select Filter -> Generator -> Stripes.
It won't look right unless you mess with some of the settings. Drag Color 1 down all the way, modify the Width and bring the Sharpness all the way down. It should look something like the image above.
With Acorn we can string filters together for better flexibility later down the road. Hit the plus button on the green bar at the bottom of the Stripes module in the filter window. This will bring up a nifty little filter dialog box. Select Tile Effects -> Perspective Tile Using the preview area to the left of the filter window drag around the four corners of image and modify the perspective.
We're Now going to add some text over the top. Grab the Text Tool
and a fun font and write some text in. Heres the result.Back to Acorn -> Tips and Tricks