Tag photos #pixelate so we can find them on Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Facebook!
A week ago we released Pixlr 3.0 for iOS and Android, which sports a brand-new user interface. Almost all of the tools in the app are the same, although a few have been moved around or grouped into new toolsets. The one big change in the app is the new brush system. It adds History Brush functionality that’s always available — now called the Eraser — but you may or may not have noticed a few new brushes. One of our favorites is the Pixelate brush. It lets you transform your photo into a pixelated representation that can make your photo look like Windows 95-era pixel art. You can control how big you make the pixels and you an even selectively paint them on or erase them in key areas. We’ve been watching how people use the new Pixelate brush, and we thought it would be a good time for the community to try their hand at this new option. This week, let’s #pixelate, y’all!
What might you make with the Pixelate brush? Well, we’ve already seen some power users of our app make some neat stuff by isolating an object like his photo of a leaf by Alexander Znavsky (@znavsky on Instagram):
One thing the Pixelate brush provides — which a lot of people have asked for over time — is the ability to anonymize people in photos. If you want to share a photo to Instagram but want to blur out a child’s face, this is one way to do it. Or, you can make something a little more mischievous (and silly) by blurring out something in a photo with some unnecessary censorship:
Or, instead of making fun of blessed icons with the Pixelate brush, why not lift up an iconic painting everyone is familiar with by turning it into a new kind of contemporary digital art:
When you turn all — or part — of an iconic image like this into pixels, it almost imparts some new kind of meaning to it:
We’ll leave it up to you to decide if this pixel treatment adds new meaning to the Statue of Liberty. Of course, you don’t have to use images of icons. Even a selfie can be pixelated, but the best ones seem to have started out as well-balanced photos.
Can you think up something new to do with the Pixelate brush? We’re betting you can. When you do, tag you photo #pixelate so we can find it on Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Facebook. We’re happy to accept both the silly and possibly shocking news photos grabbed from the Internet right alongside sublimely beautiful pixel art taken and edited lovingly on your phone. What really matters in these challenges is creativity.