Archives for August 8, 2017

Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)

Reflections

Once again, Glee has outed me! She saw my finished layout in the Gallery and just knew today’s tutorial would relate to how I created my title. I used a pretty but fairly simple script font called Black Olives. It’s an upright font so I chose the Italic Text tool option. The colour was pulled from the sky in my photo.

After I had my text the size I wanted it and in the spot I wanted it, I simplified then duplicated the text layer. CTRL/CMD>J, remember. Then I “grabbed” the handle at the top centre of my bounding box – make sure yours is on! – and pulled it straight down. The Move tool options include a spot to Constrain Proportions; if you select that, it will automatically size your image. If you look at the numbers in the boxes, one will say 100% (for example) and the other will say -100%. But for this technique you don’t have to constrain proportions if you don’t want to. You can make it whatever height you want. When you’re happy, hit the check-mark.

The next step I took was to Skew the image. Image>Transform>Skew takes you there. Then I pulled the lower corner handles a bit to the right. You can eye-ball for this step, or you can turn on the grid (CTRL/CMD>’) to help you do it evenly. But only if you’re really… umm… particular.

And I am. I turned on the grid so I could move those handles about the same distance. I also nudged the skewed layer down a little, as you’ll see in the next screenshot.

If you’re a faithful reader you’ll know that I’m rarely satisfied with basic. I went on to jazz things up a little by applying some special effects. I made a copy of the skewed layer then added some panache. The fx button at the bottom of your layers panel includes some basic styles, such as Drop Shadows, Glows and Bevels. By selecting any one of those you’ll have access to all of the default settings as shown below. I used a commercially available style set, but the settings below will give you the same effects. Check the Glow and Inner boxes, with black (000000) for the Colour. Set the Size to about 18 and the Opacity to about 13. Then go down and check the Bevel box, Direction up and Size at 24. You can see that the topmost skewed layer looks a little shiny with some dimension to it.

Then I went down to the original skewed layer and decreased its Opacity down to 28%. I wanted some of the blue to remain, but the shiny dimensional stuff to be most visible.

Then I merged the two skewed layers.

I chose another font, this time a simple sans serif one called Caviar Dreams. I pulled a pink from one of the papers I used then added some special effects to it too. The Glow and Inner boxes are checked again, Size is at 70 and Opacity at 50. The Bevel is set at 24 and Up again.

I decided a little drop shadow on the two fancy layers was needed because of their dimension and the end result looks like this.

You know what’s the best part? You can do this to almost anything! You can create a mirror image of a photo, an element, a brush (on its own layer, of course!), make an object look like it’s casting a really long shadow… so many ways you can make this work for you! Give it a whirl. I know you’ll find some really creative ways to use it and to combine it with other cool techniques. See you in a week.