Archives for December 2016

Kustomize Your Kits!

Are you all ready for another Tutorial Tuesday? You might recall that I mentioned I’m always looking for new ideas for these posts and that if you had something you’d like to try but didn’t know how to get started, you could post to the GingerScraps Facebook Fan Page. Well, Ellen (GingerScraps member name gmae) doesn’t have a Facebook account so she sent me a private message. She wants to know how to recolour elements to coordinate better with her photos. So I used this opportunity to put together a  for the December Inspiration Challenge while playing around with colours. I used a kit by  BoomersGirl Designs called Good Morning Sunshine and a Tinci Designs template from Autumn Stories 4.

There are several different techniques you can use that produce different results. Don’t be alarmed by the number of screenshots in this tut, most of them are results images. You can easily skim through the whole post and then come back to a specific technique later. These posts are always tagged Tutorial Tuesday and the posts don’t expire, so they’re easy to find. There will also be a link to each of them on the GS Facebook Fan Page.

Let’s start with a button. This one has a variety of different colours in it, and it’s the pink that I want to change a bit.

I selected a shade of pink from one of my photos that has a bit more orange in it for my change. Select the Color Picker (eye dropper) tool and then click on the spot on your photo that you want to pick up.

In the screenshot above, my new pink is in the foreground. It has to move to the background for the next step so to do that I clicked on that little two-pointed arrow and moved it to the background.

Then I selected Enhance>Adjust Color>Replace Color from the tabular menu at the top of my workspace.

This is what the pop-up menu for Replace Color looks like. With the Color Picker selected, I clicked on the pink of the button. Now both colour boxes have the same shade of pink in them.

**Here’s why the more orange-y pink had to be moved to the background. See how the foreground colour has also changed to the pink from the button? I used to always forget to move my desired colour to the background and made a lot of extra work for myself.

To change the button pink to my more orange-y pink, I clicked on the colour box in the Replacement section of the menu, then clicked on the BACKGROUND colour box.

The Color Picker menu pops up and shows how the colour will be changed. If I wasn’t totally happy with the colour I’d already put in the background, I could now adjust it with this menu by moving my cursor.

Once I clicked OK in the Color Picker menu this is how the Replace Color menu looked.

And here is the transformed button. The difference isn’t in your face, but it’s definitely noticeable. (I later decided to change the green a bit too, and used the same technique.)

Let’s do a fairly simple flower next. This is one of the easiest ways of adjusting a colour. If you need to, you can drag and drop the item you want to customize onto your photo so you can see the change and know when to stop tweaking. For this adjustment, I selected Enhance>Adjust Color>Adjust Hue/Saturation (keyboard shortcut is CTRL/CMD+U).

The pop-up menu looks like this.

Sliding the Hue adjuster in the Master channel to the left did this:

And sliding it to the right did this:

To get a similar orange-y pink as I used before, these are the sliders I moved and their final positions. Notice that the gray and white area didn’t change, but the brad in the centre did. And the shading and highlights are adjusted for uniformity.

The next thing I played with was this spray of leaves. I wanted it to be a caramel colour. Same process as for the flower above to begin with, I did something a bit different in the next step.

This time I only want to change the Yellows, so I clicked on the little triangle of the Channel selector and chose Yellows. (Keyboard shortcut: CTRL/CMD+4)

I moved all of the sliders this time, until I had the colour I wanted.

Let’s change ONE COLOUR in a patterned paper! Using the Color Picker tool again I chose the colour I wanted to change by clicking on a green dot on the paper. When the Color Picker menu opened, I then moved the slider on the little rainbow toward the blue end a little. I didn’t change the saturation or value of the colour, only the hue.

Since I’m going to replace the olive-y green with a more minty shade, I moved my desired colour to the background, just like I did for the button. (Keyboard shortcut for switching foreground and background colours: simply the letter X)

And then I again selected Enhance>Adjust Color>Replace Color.

I had to tell the software what colour I was replacing, just as for the button.

See how there’s a scattering of dots? That’s where the magic will happen.

I then clicked on the bottom colour box in the Replacement section of the menu and clicked on my background colour over on the Tool panel.

Can you see the change?

Let’s look at yet another way of adjusting the appearance of our elements with this star. I used the Magic Wand selection tool to select the pink corrugated centre of this element because I don’t want to change the brown border. The next steps will only change what’s inside the marching ants.

This time I’m going to Adjust Color Curves in the Enhance menu.

This is what the pop-up menu looks like. I stayed with the Default curves to start with. When I moved the sliders for Highlights, Midtone Brightness, Midtone Contrast and Shadows, the graph on the right changed as well. The difference is obvious, but still subtle.

Another adjustment that can be made to slightly alter colour is to adjust the Lighting. I’ll show you how adjusting Levels changes the same area of the star. (Keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD+L)

This is the pop-up menu for this enhancement. You can change the channel you want to adjust, and you have both Input Levels and Output Levels to adjust. Play with them a bit so you can see what they do.

These are the settings I chose. You can see in the image behind the menu what the changes have done.

The title I wanted to use for my layout was the same bright pink as everything else. So I used Enhance>Adjust Color>Adjust Hue/Saturation (CTRL/CMD+U) again. Once I had it on my layout I made a few more tweaks, since I could see it clearly close to the more orange-y pink of my other customizations.

These are my initial adjustments.

Last but not least, I wanted to show you how to customize fabric or natural flowers with gradations of colour and shadow. This is just a random flower I pulled from the GingerBread Ladies collab By the Dozen.

The images below are pretty self-explanatory. You can easily see how different adjustments change the colour and appearance of the flower.

Pulling the sliders all the way to one side or the other results in almost identical appearances.

Here are some examples of what little tweaks can do.

You may have noticed that the little centre of the flower also changes with each of these adjustments. You might not want that, especially if it’s a button, brad, or some other item that looks odd when recoloured. So here’s how to avoid that. Use the Magic Wand tool to select the area you DON’T want to change.

As you’ve probably noticed above, you can adjust only what is selected, as I showed you with the star. That’s NOT what we want to do here, so we’re going to INVERT our selection. (CTRL/CMD+SHIFT+I) That moves the marching ants to the rest of the image.

I did exactly the same adjustments on the Reds channel as above, but the centre isn’t touched. Cool, right?

We’ve only scratched the surface here, but I think you’ve got lots of options to be going on with. Give it a whirl!

Ellen also had another suggestion, which was sheer BRILLIANCE! She asked if it would be possible for me to run a monthly challenge, similar to but separate from, the GingerScraps monthly challenges that are already well-established. I mulled it over and this is what I’ve come up with. Each month there will be 4 or 5 different tutorials posted. Everyone who creates a layout using one of that month’s tutorials and posts their layout on the GS Facebook Fan Page, tagged Tutorial Tuesday Challenge, or posts a link in the comments below the month’s final tut, will be entered into a random draw. The results of the draw will be posted in both locations and the winner will get to pick the topic for one of the upcoming tutorials. How does that sound?

To recap:

• Create a layout using one of the month’s tutorials
• Post your layout to the GS Facebook Fan Page, or a link to it in the Blog post comments. Tag the post/comment with Tutorial Tuesday <insert month here> Challenge.
• Think about what you’d like me to write about next.
• Wait until the end of the month when Mr. Random chooses a winner.

Happy New Year, y’all!

Reverse Stencilling with Brushes

Season’s greetings all you GingerScrappers! The countdown is on… This year Hanukkah and Christmas collide, making this week probably the busiest of the year for so many of us as we prepare for the celebration of miracles and love. So I’m bringing you another quick and easy technique for jazzing up your layouts, one that won’t take more than a few minutes to try. Let’s get going.

This technique is another digital version of a paper-scrapping and crafting one similar to the inked edges technique I showed you a couple of Tuesdays ago… without the mess. Reverse stenciling is super-simple digitally – the hard part is choosing your tools! For this tutorial I’ve used a gorgeous bundle called In the Frosty Air from the brilliant Katie of Ooh La La Scraps. I’m also using a fabulous template in the Christmas Steps 1 collection from the lovely Krisztina, aka Tinci Designs. The layout is for the Scraplift Challenge, hosted this month by Ginger of Dandelion Dust Designs.

You might notice that I’ve flipped the template horizontally, because that worked better for my photo. We’re going to be working on the background layer, so I’ve turned off the visibility for all the layers BUT the background. That way I can see exactly what I’m doing. If you’re a faithful reader, you’ll remember how to do this quickly, but to review… Roll your cursor over the little eyeball icons while holding down the Left Click button and all the eyes will close.

My background paper is a very neutral grungy gray and I’m using acrylic snowflakes from In the Frost Air, which means they’re VERY hard to see in this step. So I’ve circled them for you below. Squint really hard… there they are! As you might also notice, I have all the snowflake layers selected in the Layers panel. That’s because I’m going to merge the snowflakes into a single layer.

I wanted the paint layer to be this beautiful, cool minty green, so I used the Color Picker to select a spot from the chevron paper.

The next step is to create an NEW layer just above the snowflake layer. DON’T FORGET this step!

I selected a dirty spray paint brush from my collection of free brushes. (Don’t have a spray paint brush? I got mine from Brusheezy.) If you look closely, you’ll see that pretty mint green color I selected in the Foreground Color box, that I have the brush at its maximum Size of 2500 pixels and the Opacity is 100%. By doing this part of the technique on its own layer, I can later adjust both the size of the brush and the opacity later. I can also move it around!

To keep the patches of spray paint from all looking exactly alike, I used the Brush Settings menu to change the angle of the brush. It’s also possible to adjust the roundness of the brush in this menu, but I kept it round.

Once I’d applied some paint over top of each of my 6 snowflakes, I needed to Select the snowflake shapes ON the paint layer. To do that, I made sure the paint layer was the active one in the Layers panel, then I clicked on the snowflake layer thumbnail.

That gave me those delightful little marching ants, as shown in the screenshot below.

The final step to get that amazing reverse stencil look is to delete the areas inside the marching-ant boundaries. CTRL/CMD>X and it’s done. When I played with this using a more solid snowflake png, the difference was much more obvious, but I really liked the way this looked so I kept going. That’s the whole technique, in just a few easy steps.

Now, if you have a few more minutes, I want to give you some tips on making sure the effect is as close to perfect as you can make it. I turned the visibility of my template layers back on so I could see where the spray paint actually goes – where it will be in the finished layout. It wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be – behind the cluster – so I moved the whole layer down a bit using the Move tool.

That created a little problem. Because my sprays went over the edge of the background paper at the top, I now had a pretty sharp line where the paint stopped. And that defeated the purpose! So I used the same spray brush at a much smaller size, and the Eraser tool to soften that edge.

Then I went ahead and finished my layout. You can see the subtle stenciled snowflakes quite easily now, and if you look really closely at the gallery image I’ve linked, you might be able to see that I’ve also used every one of those acrylic snowflakes again in their unaltered form.

Some of you might remember that I told you I always save a PSD form of my layouts until I’m SURE I’m not going to change anything. Look at the screenshot below and you’ll see why! I substituted a piece of ric rac for two paper strips. But in my excitement at how awesome I thought my layout was, I forgot to delete one of the dark brown paper place markers. You can see it, about halfway down on the left side. I didn’t notice it, or the fact that I’d forgotten to shadow the ric rac layers, until I’d posted to the Gallery, the Challenge thread, my Cookie Jar and to the GS Facebook page. Urk!! All was not lost… I fixed it and edited my posts so everyone would think I’m perfect. 😀

I hope you liked this lesson; I’ll be looking for your reverse stencil layouts in the gallery. One more tutorial before the year ends. What shall it be??

Merry Christmas, חג חנוכה שמח (Chag urim sameach), Happy Kwanzaa, Meán Geimhridh Sona Duit… Happiest Holidays!