I was on /wg/ today and someone had posted a desktop screenshot, asking for the original wallpaper. At first glance, it just looked like a basic, pixelated image, but upon closer inspection, the pixels had rounded edges and a slight sharpening effect. The pixels were also on an angle, something not possible with the standard mosaic filter.

I looked at it for a while, wondering how it had been done, assuming it must have been a filter or maybe a script in GIMP. Since I had the original, unpixelated version, I thought I’d have a go at recreating the wallpaper for the person that had requested it.

The first thing I noticed was the angle of the pixels. I opened the screenshot in Photoshop and used the Ruler tool (I) to measure the angle. It was about 25 degrees.

I opened the original, unpixelated wallpaper and got started. Out of habit, I duplicated the layer (Alt+L+D) and took note of the image size (because we’ll be cropping it back to this size, later). This particular image is 2560×1024 px (dual screen wallpaper).

The first step is to rotate the image -25 degrees to get the angled pixels. To do this, I went to Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary (Alt+I+E+A) and entered -25 (Clockwise).

Now to add the pixel effect, I went to Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic. A value of 40 looked similar to the requested version.

After that, I needed to rotate the image back to it’s original level and crop the edges. To cancel the original rotation, I went back to arbitrary rotate and entered 25 (not minus) to get it straight. Then, I went to Image > Canvas Size (Ctrl+Alt+C) to crop it back to the original dimensions – 2560×1024 – which I entered into the boxes.

The final step was the add the rounded/sharpened effect. I was stumped. Having come this far, though, I decided to experiment with some filters to see if I could get anything similar. I started looking through the filters and to my surprise, Paint Daubs worked perfectly. I had the settings of Brush Size: 8, Sharpness 4 and Brush Type: Simple.

In the image below you can see before the Paint Daubs effect and after.

And that completes the effect. I’ve grown to quite like it. It’s close to the requested one, but not exact. I have no idea who made the original, but I’d love to know how they did it.

Download the final wallpaper above.