Pixelmator Forums

This is in response to the people who have been asking for a "user friendly" version of the User Manual.

Recently I wanted to print a few pages without all the black ink. The major problem I found in converting the pages was not "black" so much, as all the shades of "grey". This is a method I came up with after a few trials. I am only a beginner at this so there is probably an easier way. Even so, it doesn't take too long once you get going.


First, in Preview, save the pages you are interested in as JPEG (or whatever your favourite non-Pixelmator format is). This is my example page:



Open the page in Pixelmator and create a two duplicate layers - my three layers are Base, Mid and Top.



Working with the Top layer, select all the areas which are different to the body of the page - in this case the two photos and the light grey Information box. Clear/delete them. Then make the Top layer invisible and select the Mid layer. The Layers palette will look like this.



Clear/delete everything except those sections which you cleared above, which you want to process for the final version. In this case only the Information box remains. (Note: if you don't have any such sections you don't need the Mid layer, or this processing.) The Layers palette now looks like this.



Make the Base and Mid layers invisible, and select and make the Top layer visible.



Deselect everything, and select Invert from the Image menu.



Just to make things a little easier, set the foreground colour to the new middle grey background. Select Replace Colour… from the Image menu. Because you set the foreground colour, you can ignore the colour wheel and the items above it. Set Saturation to -100, Lightness to 100, and hit OK.



Make the Top layer invisible and select and make the Mid layer visible. Repeat that last set of steps (from "Deselect everything…") for the Mid layer.

Make all the layers visible, et voila.


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Come up and see my etchings sometime

There is a white background version of user manual that is much more economical to print. You can get it at the following link: http://pixelmator.s3.amazonaws.com/Pixelmator-Manual-151-WB.pdf