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Pixelated Fireworks Tutorial

by admin on 06/03/09 at 1:59 pm

I know that there are some pixelating plugins available for Fireworks, but I thought I would attempt some pixelating effects with Fireworks CS4 straight out of the box, and with no outside help. So let's begin.

Create a new document at whatever size you like. Import (Ctrl-R) a bitmap image of your choosing. I used the same old, same old that ships with windows here:

We're going to do something sneaky now that will help us in our pixelating mayhem. Click Ctrl-U to display Preferences and change the Interpolation setting to Nearest Neighbour (preserve hard edges). You normally would never use this setting as it degrades images pretty badly when you resize them. But zis eez vot ve vont!

Resize the image to around 5% of its original size by clicking Modify > Transform > Numeric Transform, make sure scale is selected and enter 5 into both height and width boxes. If we reduce the size too much, we will lose too much information about the image and when we size it up again, there won't be enough detail, so you may have to trial and error how much you initially decrease the size.

Zoom in on the image if necessary and use the scale tool to increase the size of the image.  Just drag a corner and eyeball it. I ended up with something like this:

This might be good enough for some. But not us. We're going to apply an unsharp mask to freak it out a little. With the image selected, click the Add Live Filters button in the Properties panel > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask. I'd recommend experimenting with the settings but the ones I used are:

Et voila.