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!
