The AliveColors image editor is a wonderful tool that can be helpful for both professional and casual users alike. Using AliveColors, you can apply a variety of image-enhancement and stylizing effects to your images. This tutorial shows how to create a mosaic effect using the Texture Brush and layer effects.

 

Creating a Texture

Create a new document (File -> New...). In the Width field, enter 1 px; in the Height field, enter 10 px. Click OK.

Select the Color Pencil tool , set the size to 1 px and fill the top five pixels with black.

Save the created image as a texture. To do this, select the New Texture... command in the Edit menu, enter the name of the texture and click ОК.

Select the Texture Brush in the toolbar and press the F5 key to open the Tool Options panel. Select the Hard Square Brush preset, adjust the size to cover the width of the photo, go to the Texture tab, select the created texture in the list, reduce the Scale value in the Properties tab to 2% and enable the Tile check-box.

 

Creating an Effect

Open the photo in the AliveColors image editor.

Duplicate the background layer by right-clicking on it and selecting Duplicate... in the context menu.

Add a mask to the layer copy by clicking at the bottom of the Layers panel.

Fill the mask using the Texture Brush with the settings specified above. You should get the following:

At the bottom of the Layers panel, click and select the Outer Shadow effect. Adjust the effect parameters:

Switch to the background layer and blur it (Effects -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur...). Here is the result:

 

You can get different mosaic effects by creating different textures for the Texture Brush.