Wallpaper

Recently, Scott Bourne released an iPhone wallpaper – a great shot of a grizzly bear standing upright. The problem? Most time when you look at your wallpaper, it is when you fire up your iPhone. And there, the top and bottom are obstructed by the iPhone’s control overlay. Thus, the bear’s head is almost invisible in Scott’s wallpaper. Bummer!

Whenever I create a wallpaper (see here and here for my free wallpapers), I design it specifically so the image is not obstructed by the iPhone’s controls. Here is how I do it:

This interior shot of an Excalibur will be used in my wallpaper

1. Create the iPhone wallpaper background.

• Fire up Photoshop and create a new image with the following settings: Width 320 pixels, Heigth 480 pixels and Resolution 72 dpi
• You could simply pick a background color and use the Paint Bucket Tool to fill up the background. Instead, I will apply a gradient between two colors as my background.
• Choose a dark gray (#393939) as foreground color and a lighter gray (#9c9c9c) as the background color, then Layer, New Fill Layer, Gradient… Click OK, then in the Gradient Fill form, pick Foreground to Background in the Gradient drop-down and make sure that Reverse is checked. Click OK, then merge the layers (Command-Shift-E on a Mac, Control-Shift-E on a PC)

After step 1: Gradient applied

2. Add the bottom and top placeholders

• Download the following two images: Top Clock and Bottom Slider
• These two images will be added to the top and the bottom to blank out the space that will be taken by the actual clock and the slider bottom on the iPhone. Once the wallpaper is done, they will be removed.
• Open the top clock image in Photoshop. Do a Select All (Command-A for Mac, Control-A for PC), then copy the selection to the clipboard. Click on over to the background, paste the selection, then move it to the top. If done correctly, you’ll see that the image was copied as a layer. This way, we can simply delete the layer at the end in order to take the top clock out of the image.
• Do the same for the bottom slider and move the pasted image to the bottom

After step 2: Placeholders added as two separate layers

3. Add the image

• With the placeholders added, you have 320×270 pixels left for the actual image
• Open in Photoshop the image that you would like to use for the wallpaper and if needed, make any adjustments you like
• If you want to use the entire available space of 320×270 pixels, select the rectangular marquee tool, set style to fixed ratio (not fixed pixels), set width to 320 and heigth to 270. Draw the rectangle to your liking, then crop everything that is outside of the selection (Image/Crop).
• Now that the image has the right aspect ratio, resize the image to 320×270 pixels (Image/Image Size). Use your favorite sharpening method to sharpen the image, if you want to.
• Similar to the top clock and the bottom slider images, do a Select All, then copy the selection to the clipboard. Click on over to the background, paste the selection, then move it into the open space between the two space-holders.

After step 3: Picture added, right before removing the top and bottom placeholders

4. Finishing the wallpaper

• All that is left is to remove Layers 1 and 2 to get the final image (right click on each layer, then select Delete Layer
• If you want, you can sharpen the image, if you have not done so yet, or add a watermark
• Flatten all remaining layers (Command-Shift-E), then save the image as a PNG.

Voila – your wallpaper is done. Simply upload it to your iPhone and start using it. (Remember to use the Flickr trick to preserve image quality during the upload)

The actual files for this project can be downloaded here: final JPG wallpaper or Photoshop PSD file will all layers.

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