Mac Tiger Tutorial

Hey there!!

Now I have really outdone myself… Here is a tutorial for te popular Mac OSX Tiger wallpaper:
Check it out. Though this tutorial will look really short, I actually spent 2-3 hours in making this wallpaper. I will be telling you how to make just one of the many “swipes”.. the rest you will have to make yourself. This is what we will make:

Step 1: The Background

I spent half an hour (no exageration), just trying to get the colours for the background gradient right. The colors I came up with are #1b317a and #35639e. Make a subtle gradient with more weight at the bottom.

Step 2: The Main Design

Pick up the pen tool, and try to ape the mac design. What else can I say? I can only suggest that
1. Only 2 anchor points are enough to draw any of the curves in this wallpaper.
2. Drag the mouse a long way after making an anchor, to make a smooth curve.
3. It is not necessary to make an anchor on the image. It can also lie outside. eg. see the image:

Step 3

Once you are satisfied with the curve, let it be. Make a new layer. Select the brush tool (dont worry, it wont delete your path). Select a very small (1-3px) and soft (0-50% hardness) brush. Make your forground color white.
Next, right-click on the path, and select “Stroke Path” from the context menu. Make sure that the “Simulate Pressure: is checked.

Step 4

Close the path outside the image. (just make random anchor points, overlapping the final one with the first one.).
Right click on the path and select “Make Selection”. This will convert your path to a selection area.

Go to the menu “Select>Save Selection”, and give it any name you want. Just make sure you can identify which curve you are talking about just by looking at the name later on. (eg. I named the curves c1, c2, c3 etc. in the order that i made them).

Step 5

On a new layer, pick up a large brush (400px) and 0% hardness. Choose a light shade of blue as your foreground color. Use the brush to make a little patch of light color.. You will probably have to try it out a few times to get it right.

Here is a detailed close-up shot:

Step 6

Select the layer which had the pen-stroke on it. Go to “Layer>Layer Styles>Blending Options>Drop Shadow” and apply the following settings:

Step 7 : The Difficult Part

I hope that it was easy to follow the tutorial up to this point. But now it gets more abstract/difficult/self-service .
You will have to make the rest of the wallpaper yourself. I can provide these little points:

1. Make sure that all pen-strokes are on their own layer. All brushing to be done on seperate layers too.
2. The order of the curves matters. So look at the original Mac wallpaper to get the idea. See which curve seems to lie above the other. You can tell by looking at the shadows.

3. Always “Save Selection”, after making a curve. You will have to “Load Selection” after each curve to fill in the color. It is difficult to explain, but look at this image:

Basically, if you have one selection, you can merge/intersect/subtract it from another selection by using the “Load Selection” feature. This is where the name of the saved selection matters. You can form all types of areas with this feature. for eg.

For the selection shown in the above image, pick up a large, soft, black brush and paint along the outer edges to form a shadow that is deeper at the corners. You cant use the drop shadow here if you want it to be detailed.

So that is pretty much it.. Even I made it by hit and trial. So put on some music and give it a try. The final thing:

Check out the original Mac OSX Tiger wallpaper that comes pre-loaded on a Mac:

A problem that I am facing is that Google has suddenly stopped crawling my blog . I have no idea why. So any posts that I have put up after 19th september dont seem to be coming in the google results. If any of you ahve any idea about this, please do help. And comments are very very very welcome.

Signing off,
The Photoshopper