Customizing Template Banners

First, I want to thank all the GingerScrappers who reached out with kind thoughts and prayers for my Dad. I can’t tell you how much they were appreciated and how much better they made me feel. I wish I could say he’s back to normal but he’s back in the hospital and will be there for the foreseeable future. He’s in the safest place he can be for right now and although he’s not happy about it, he’s accepted it. And life will go on.

I got a request from Bernice (bkasko) about making banners look more realistic. “I would love help with making a banner look more real. I am not talking about the shading on the banner flags even though help with that would be great but on the top of the banner where it meets the string. I have tried the dodge and burn tool and I just cannot get the look I want. I saw an action that unfortunately only works on the banner that the action makes and it looks like a blurred line is made but I could not duplicate it. I would love help with making a banner from a designers kit look more real or even a banner in a template that I add my own papers to. Thanks.” I wasn’t totally sure I understood what she was asking so I asked her some questions.  Her response: “I have an action that will make a banner for me and I really like the shading on it and would like to be able to create the shading that it does either on a banner that comes in the kit I am using or sometimes a template has a banner on it and I like the placement of that banner so I would like to use it.” So I settled on this.

I looked through my stash and found a Connie Prince template in a retired Triple Threat pack that has a banner and would work with some of the photos of my grandkids I’ve been saving up for layout creation. This is the one I chose.

The first thing I did was select the kit I wanted to use and gather up an assortment of papers from it. Then I went through the template and turned off visibility to all but the banner and background paper layers so I could see clearly what I was doing… and so could you! To clip different papers to the pennants on the banner, I’ll need to separate them from each other and set them up on their own layers. So I’m using the Rectangle Marquee tool to select each pennant and will start on the far left.

To detach the pennant from the banner, Edit>Cut (CTRL/CMD>X) works well.

It’s gone, but it’s not gone-gone. Elements is hanging on to it for me, I just can’t see it. To bring it back, Edit>Paste (CTRL/CMD>V) does the trick.

The neat thing is that although Elements drops it right on the centre of the workspace, it’s exactly the same size and positioned at the exact angle of the original, so sliding it into place is simple. See it over there in the Layers Panel? This process is repeated for each of the triangle pennants across the banner.

This image shows what I was looking at on my workspace several pennants down the road. Each of the pennants I’ve Cut and Pasted are back in line and on their own layers.

After all the pennants have been separated onto their own layers I can use them as Clipping Masks for my papers. The kit I’m using is also a Connie Prince creation called Sense of Wonder. (It’s not available at GingerScraps yet, but should be here soon.)

The pennants are small and the patterns on some of these papers aren’t, so I’ll Resize and Rotate them to give a pleasing look. This can be done before or after you’ve clipped the paper to the object under it.

Now to Clip the paper to that pennant. For those who aren’t sure what I’m talking about, Clipping a paper or photo to a shape underneath it “cuts” the paper or photo to conform with the shape. There are two ways to do this: Right-click on the paper layer and select Create Clipping Mask from the dropdown menu, or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD>G (for Elements versions up to 14) or CTRL/CMD>ALT>G for versions 15 and up.

Here I’m showing how I Rotated the paper so the arrows line up with the pennant better. I just clicked on one of the little square “handles” on the outside edge of the paper and moved it in the direction I wanted it to go.

I followed the same steps with each of the pennants across the banner, using the same paper twice in some instances.

Once I had all the pennants Clipped to papers I went through the Layers Panel and Merged the papers with their pennants. I did this to make managing the banner and working through the next series of steps easier. But I’m not going to Merge all the pennants together because I’m going to use one of the Warped Shadow techniques from a previous tutorial to customize the way each looks based on what it’s sitting on when the layout is done. Merging layers can be done in two different ways. Select the layers to be Merged (hold down the CTRL/CMD key and click on each of them) then Right-Click, choosing Merge Layers or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD>E.

After each paper and pennant have been Merged, it’s on to adding some dimension, to make it look like the pennants are wrapped around some string. I’m going to start at the far left and work to the right, but you do it whatever suits you. For these steps, Zooming in will make it easier.

To simulate the look of paper-wrapped string, we’re going to use the Dodge and Burn tools. These tools are digital versions of good old film photo printing techniques to spot-correct exposure. When printing an old-fashioned paper print, the developer can lighten up areas that are too dark in the original contact sheet image by Dodging – holding a piece of paper or an actual dodging tool over the area that’s too dark, moving it continuously to prevent demarcation lines around the edges, between the enlarger and the photo paper, decreasing the amount of light that hits the paper. Yes, it’s just as much work as it sounds, and I never got good at it. The Dodge tool in Elements has an icon that looks just like a Dodging tool! Burning, conversely, darkens areas that are too light with a similar technique but this time using a larger piece of card with a hole in it, moving the card between the enlarger and the paper over the area that’s too light to allow more light to hit the paper. Here, the Burn tool icon is a hand with the thumb and fingertips touching. They’re are very labour-intensive processes and totally a trial-and-error thing. I wasted so much paper back in my film days! Aren’t you glad digital is so much simpler?? And that your faithful Obijan does the trial-and-error stuff for you! Let’s get to it!

First I want to show you the way I’ve set up my Preferences for Cursors. The next part will make more sense to you if I show you.

Starting with the Burn tool, using a 9 pixel round brush on the Midtones, and a 45% exposure, I put the intersection of the crosshairs right on the upper left corner of the pennant. (You don’t have to be super-precise for these steps – the cursor can start somewhere off the edge of the pennant, because the only layer this step will actually affect is the pennant itself. But this Burn process has to be at the very edge.) Click at that corner then holding down the Shift key, move the cursor to the opposite, upper right corner of the pennant and Click again. You’ll see a faint but noticeable darkening of that edge.

Then I changed to the Dodge tool, set to Midtones, 15 pixels and 45% Exposure. I’ve positioned the cursor with the top edge of the brush tip at the upper edge of the pennant. Again, Click, Shift, move, Click. This step lightens up the area it covers. The effect is pretty subtle but once the last step is done, you’ll see quite a difference.

Just a word about the settings I’ve used. They’re right for the scale of this banner. If I was using bigger pennants and creating a thicker string, I’d go with a bigger brush for both steps, keeping the ratio roughly the same.

Flipping back to the Burn tool, oh look! The settings are still the same as the ones I used for the first Burn step! Isn’t that just perfect?! I don’t have to remember them, Elements does it for me. Knowing this makes the rest of the process look a lot less daunting. I’m again going to put the cursor on the left side of the pennant, with the top edge of the brush tip at the edge of the lightened area. Click, Shift, move, Click.

Now that I’ve done a couple of the pennants, I think it really looks like there’s some string in there.

Using the same three steps, I worked my way all across the pennant and down the Layers Panel until all the pennants have been wrapped around my imaginary string.

The effect is more obvious on solid papers and those with smaller patterns, but when you look at it as a whole, it looks pretty realistic.

The ends of the banner will be hidden behind other embellishments on my layout so I’m not worried about having tails on my “string”. If you’d like to see my finished layout, you can find it here.

Well, that’s a wrap for this week! Thanks for the suggestion Bernice. I had fun doing this for you. I hope it’s what you were looking for. If not, I can try again another time.

Method Scrapping – What’s My Motivation?

Actually, I think I should call this tutorial “WHERE is my Motivation??” I’ve really been struggling lately trying to find some inspiration and some enthusiasm for scrapping. Between our move, all the things that moving entails, my dad’s failing health and all the other minutiae of life, it feels like my mojo just got left behind. So I started to think of all the different methods of resurrecting it and thought maybe I should put them all down in a blog post as a way of solidifying them for myself while possibly helping someone else who’s in the doldrums too.

I think the easiest and most obvious mojo-recharger is to do a GingerScraps Challenge or two. What makes them a good jumpstart? Well, they take a lot of the work out of the process. The challenge gives a framework for the layout, whether it’s a beautiful brush, inspiring word art, a terrific (free) template, a beautiful layout to scraplift or cutting out all the hardest part by providing a recipe. But the best part of this is that you’re not limited to only this month’s Challenges! The Challenge forum has 5 months’ worth of them to look at and find inspiration from.

Another way to stir your creative juices is to look at what other people are doing. Pinterest, Instagram and our GingerScraps Gallery are filled with incredible layouts to draw sparks from. A way to refine that even further is to narrow your browsing to a favourite Designer Gallery. There’s where you can see their designs in action and find innovative ways of using them.

That brings me to a motivator that might seem more like a cattle prod… organizing your supplies. Sometimes I get caught up in the acquisition part of it all, adding more and more beautiful kits to my stash without any clear plan for how I’ll use them. And, of course, I forget what I have and go buy more! I had a HUGE downloads folder filled with still-zipped files sitting on my laptop and every time I opened the folder, I had an anxiety attack. So the other day, I took the first step and ran them all through ExtractNow. I have only a handful of really new files that I picked up over the weekend that need extraction; the next step will be to sort through the files and condense them into kit-specific folders. Then I’ll have refreshed my brain and might find my way back to productivity.

A much more fun way to get back in the saddle is to look at all the recent photos on your phone or computer. We take photos so we can remember a special person, event, place or object. Recapturing the moment by looking at the photos can be very stimulating. Over the weekend (Thanksgiving in Canada) I went on a mini wine-tasting tour with my daughter, her husband and sister-in-law. It was so much fun, and so educational. And naturally it spawned a LOT of photos. I know I can scrap them into more than one layout, and right there, I have some motivating ideas. (I also have quite a number of photos of my grandchildren that are crying out for some spotlighting!)

Trying a new technique is another way to stir up some interest. Working through one of my tutorials or watching a YouTube video by someone whose work you admire can be very invigorating. Our own Karen Schulz (formerly Snickerdoodle) has a YouTube channel filled with great ideas. Why not watch one or two of hers?

Project Life offers a good compromise between free-wheeling and quick ages. Katherine Woodin is a prolific Project Life scrapper. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, Project Life is a method of celebrating the everyday activities that we often overlook as food for creativity. And it’s very flexible. You can choose to do a layout a day, keeping track of what happens and how it affects you each day as a form of daily diary. You can do a weekly layout (P52) with just the highlights of the week, or a monthly one (P12). You can use pocket-style pages, or free-form it.

Focusing on a single event or family member (a wedding, a birthday, a new job, a new house, a pet… you get the idea) can be another way to get going again. This one is a bit more of an exercise in self-discipline; making a decision to scrap a layout about fill-in-the-blank and just doing it may break the drought. I think this is where I’ll start. I haven’t changed my Signature in the Forum since MARCH!! And my Facebook header is one I created in July 2019. (It hasn’t been on display all this time, I swear! But it’s due for a refresh.)

Before I post this, I think I should remind all of us that turning a hobby into a chore isn’t a good thing. If you’re in a scrapping funk, especially one that has endured for awhile, it can be extremely daunting to think about picking up the tools and getting back to work. If you’re really not feeling it, don’t push it! Do something else that feeds your soul. It’ll be okay!

What are your methods of breaking a slump?

Faking It – Those Incredible Full Moon Photos…

Have you ever looked at those totally amazing full moon photos where it looks like the moon is rising out of the ocean, or it’s rising behind a silhouetted city skyline and it’s huge and bright? And have you ever wondered how the photographer was able to capture that image? I know how they do it, and after this tutorial you will too. Because it’s all faked!

I wasn’t planning to take photos of last weekend’s full moon so I didn’t prepare for it. But then I took the dog out for a potty break and saw it hanging so brightly in the sky with Mars at its shoulder. So I grabbed my pretty decent DSLR, my telephoto lens and my very sturdy tripod and set up on the driveway. Rushing never makes for good results though and every one of the 70 photos I took was out-of-focus. The shots I took of the mountain were better, but pretty grainy. Thankfully I have a crystal-clear photo I took of the June 2013 Super Moon and that’s what I’m going to use to show you how I can make it look like the moon was over the mountain when it was quite far away in reality. This photo of the mountain that our subdivision snugs up to has been edited a bit to make the sky a bit brighter and the details a bit sharper.

Here’s my 2013 moon shot. I used a long shutter, a tiny aperture and manual focus to get it this bright and clear.

To hang the moon over the mountain, I’m going to use a Guided Edit that first appeared in Elements 13. Guided>Photomerge>Photomerge Compose.

Once you’ve activated the Edit, this screen opens. The instructions are fairly clear, even for the uninitiated. It says to drag the photo I want to extract FROM onto the space, so the Moon is going here.

Okay, there it is. All I want from the photo is the Moon, which has a nice, clear, sharp edge, so selecting it from my photo will be easy. I can use the Quick Selection tool for this step. If my desired extraction had more detail, I could choose one of the other options. AND… there are further adjustments that can be made in later steps.

Once I clicked on the Quick button, this tool tip opened to Guide me through the next part. It says, “Create new selection by dragging over the area you need to include.”

It’s hard to see the marching ants in the screenshot but they are there. There’s even a little jaggy part that I’m going to adjust by switching from Add to Subtract and scrape it off.

Done! As I mentioned, there are more refinements you can make to extract your desired image using the Advanced Edge Refinement menu. It’s found just below the red circle.

But since I just basically have a circle, I can move on to the next step by clicking the Next arrow at the bottom of the screen. Elements always drops things right in the middle of the canvas, so it’s great that I can move my moon off the mountain and into the sky.

I decided to make it a bit bigger too, for dramatic effect. But I didn’t go too much bigger because I don’t want it to look completely phony.

Then I had second thoughts and decided to anchor it a bit by tucking it behind the mountain a smidge… after seeing that I had some Hide and Reveal options.

I started that process by Hiding the lower part of the Moon just roughly. I used a hard round brush at 100% Opacity to brush over the area that will end up being hidden by the mountain and trees. It takes several passes to completely hide the parts that I want hidden. Once I had an idea where the trees actually are, I could go back and Reveal the Moon where the trees don’t obstruct the sky. You can see in the screenshot that some of the moon looks more blue than gray – that’s where the sky hasn’t been completely Hidden. I also adjusted the size of my brush tip as needed to make the trees appear “normal”.

I switched back and forth between Hide and Reveal, adjusting the size of my brush tip until I had some natural-looking trees on my mountain. then I clicked on the Next arrow.

If your photos were taken at different times and in different lighting conditions, your composite might look pretty weird right now. Mine’s okay because night is night… But if you find your results aren’t making you happy, there’s still more in this Edit to help you get it right. The instructions say, “Click ‘Auto Match Color Tone’ to blend your extracted object with the background. You can fine tune the results with the sliders.” I highly recommend experimenting with this, because as you know, nothing is final in Elements until you say it is. If you click on the button and it does its thing but you hate the outcome, you can Undo it!! CTRL/CMD>Z should be an automatic movement. It sure is for me!

I didn’t like the results of the automatic process, so I made adjustments with the sliders. The image didn’t need a lot of adjusting to make it look more real. Then I clicked Next.

That’s the end of the Guided Edit. Now I can choose to Save, Continue Editing or Share my finished image. I want to clean up some of the noise by running the Haze Removal tool, so I’m going to click on In Expert and go there.

If you’re not familiar with the Haze Removal tool, I think you should give it a try! It sharpens your images and removes a lot of the graininess. You can get to it by Enhance>Haze Removal, or CTRL/CMD>ALT>Z works too.

It’s still an interactive process. This screen opens up and you can make adjustments to the amount of Haze Reduction it does, as well as the Sensitivity of the action. And if you’re not convinced it’s actually making a difference, you can flip between the Before and After images and see how it’s changed.

There! I think it looks pretty good, all things considered.

What do you think? Are you going to try this one? I think it would be good for adding a person who should have been in the photo but somehow wasn’t or to add someone who you only wished was there. Ooh, or maybe go right into fantasy and add a unicorn or a fairy to a photo of a baby. The sky’s the limit!

The Photoshop Elements No-Diet Weight Loss Plan

Take THREE! Today’s really starting to feel more like a Monday than a Tuesday… WordPress isn’t playing nice again this week. But I’ll persevere, because I really want you to have this little weapon in your arsenal. Kim Kern asked in the comments after last week’s post if I knew how she could slim herself down a smidge in a photo she otherwise liked. So I dug out a photo of yours truly that didn’t make me cringe so I can show you how to lose 10 pounds without dieting.

First things first. I made a Copy of my photo so I could do all my experimenting on the Copy layer and lot the original. This is a good habit to get into when you’re photo-editing because if you’re not thrilled with your efforts, you can go back to that background layer and start over. To add a Copy layer, right-click on the photo layer in the Layers Panel and select Duplicate Layer, or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD>J.

Now, to that Copy layer, I’m going to apply a Filter. Click Filter>Distort>Liquify.

The Filter menu looks like this. The Tool options are along the left hand side of the workspace and the settings are on the upper right. For this edit I’m going to use the Shift Pixels option, the one with the icon that looks like two parallel brick walls with an arrow in between them. The brush I’m using is a soft, 64 pixel basic brush with a Pressure of 66. A light hand and a soft touch will give you the best results with the least backtracking.

I started my weight loss by gently slimming my left cheek. There’s no obvious clue for which direction to move your brush, or at least I didn’t find one. I started near my chin and very gently brushed upward until I got to the top of my ear. Just a tiny change is all that’s needed.

Then I took on my back fat. For this part, I started at my neck and brushed toward my bum. This is where you can see the distortion that happens in the background. It’s something I’ll fix later.

I moved on to making my arm look less meaty. I went elbow-up on the back of my arm and shoulder down on the inside.

Muffin top was my next zone. It too worked better going bottom up. It took me a few small adjustments to get to where I felt thinner, and I was careful not to flatten my chest. It’s really easy to see the blurring on those stones!

Once I was satisfied that I’d successfully slimmed but didn’t go overboard, I clicked on OK to go back to the Expert Editor.

Now to fix the weird spots. I started with the Clone Stamp tool and Zoomed in a lot so I could make my adjustments minutely. For this part, it’s best to use a fairly small soft round brush, at least at the beginning. Never used the Clone Stamp? Decide what part of your image is going to make the least visible correction and hold down ALT then click on that spot. Move your cursor to where you want your change to happen BEFORE you click again to apply that area you just Cloned. If you’re too close to the source, you’ll end up with a muddy mess. I worked on that bit of field behind my neck.

Then I moved on to remove the droop from the thatched roof on the yellow house at my back. For this kind of fix, if you click for your source with your cursor right over the straight edge of the object, Elements will give you a nice continuous straight line when you move the cursor over. To avoid visibly blurring an area that should be sharp, like where my sweater overlaps the wall, I switched my brush tip to a hard-edged one.

One disadvantage to using the Clone Stamp tool is that it reproduces patterns exactly, so as you move along, you’ll end up with some visible pattern repeats and that will look unnatural in most cases. That’s where the Spot Healing Brush comes into the game. For this fix, I used a small, hard-edged brush, selected Content Aware and Sample All Layers in the controls and randomly clicked on the stones to break up that repetition. If I noticed that my Spot Healing looked too sharp, I swapped out my brush tip back to a soft one.

I moved on to the blurry stones to my left and followed the same steps. After I’d cleaned that area up, I Zoomed out and looked closely at the entire image to see if there were any glaring areas that still needed retouching. Then when I was satisfied with the whole image, I selected both layers, right-clicked and Merged them. But it’s just as appropriate to right-click and Flatten Image.

That’s it! That’s how I lost 10 pounds without even giving up jelly beans. My final image got a bit more adjusting: First I smoothed out the wrinkles in my neck and erased the scar from my parathyroid surgery. I Duplicated the image and sharpened it with a High Pass filter. That layer’s Blend Mode was changed to Overlay. I made yet another Copy layer then I changed the Blend Mode on that new layer to Multiply and dropped the Opacity to 25% to add some more contrast to the clouds (both are discussed in a previous tutorial). Overall, I’m really pleased with the way it came out. I look like me, only better!

Mm-kay. Let’s see what else I need to do to this post to get it right. I might even make my deadline! See you next week.