It’s a PUZZLE!

I’ll be honest, I had an incredibly hectic week and had no time to get creative. I went to bed last night with NO idea what to write about today… and woke up thinking, “Hey, why not play with one of those Fun Edits the software creators included in PSE 15?” I took a look at the October Buffet and saw all these great colours and thought maybe I could tie this tut into a Buffet challenge layout, thus getting more bang for my figurative buck. So let’s do it!

I think this photo will work nicely with the Buffet palette, and with that soft, blurry background, maybe it would lend itself to the Puzzle Effect Guided Edit.

With my photo on the workspace, I clicked on that Puzzle Effect and this menu opened up. I chose the Large option to make it easier for you to follow along.

One click, and my photo looks just like a 63-piece puzzle. How cool is that?! But there’s lots more fun to come. The second step on the list says, “Enhance the effect by selecting a puzzle piece.”

I clicked on the Select Puzzle Piece bar then clicked on a section of my photo in the centre of one puzzle piece in the lower right corner as directed. To select more than one piece, I held down the CTRL/CMD key and clicked on the four pieces outlined in the screenshot.

That set some marching ants going around the edges of those four pieces. No fiddling with the Magic Wand Tool, no Refining Edges needed. If I had wanted to select random pieces all over the photo, I could have done that rather than selecting contiguous ones.

To remove those pieces, the next step was to click on the Extract Piece bar in the menu.

Then I could move those pieces all as one to another area of my canvas by clicking on the Move Tool bar right there on the menu.

Once I’d moved those pieces up and out of the way, I could still see the puzzle grid where they had been. I could have stopped there, but I’m playing with the software so I know what it does, so I went on to the next step on the menu and clicked on the Erase Tool bar and used it to roll over the grid lines.

Boom! The grid is gone. But… there’s a white background there. If I want to see my background paper in the spot where those pieces are missing, what do I do?

What does this Next button do?

I wanted to see what else was possible, and since working in Expert Edit mode is how we all use PSE for digital scrapbooking, that’s what I clicked.

Whoa!! Look at that! There are a bunch of layers created by the Puzzle Effect edit mode and I can see them all. I moved some of them around, turned the visibility on and off and found these two layers have a transparent background. Now I knew how to make this work for a layout!

I right-clicked on the two selected layers then clicked on Duplicate Layers… in the same way I showed you when we were combining parts of two different templates.

The drop-down menu shows me my options as to where I could send them. I found my paper, which came from Heartstrings Scrap Art‘s Love & Laughter Buffet kit and clicked on that. I could have moved them onto their own canvas by selecting New from the menu, and then carried on playing with them.

Now I have three separate layers: the paper, the large puzzle photo and the four-piece corner. If you look really closely, you can see the bounding box around the two selected layers.

Now I can do whatever I want with this canvas. I’m not going to get my layout finished today, but it should be up in the Gallery soon.

I’ve really only scratched the surface of what this software can do, and I’m looking forward to sharing some more fun stuff with you next week!

A Few Quick Template and Shadow Tips

I’ve had a week to play with Elements 15 and found out the hard way that a speed scrap isn’t the best way to learn new software! There was a lot of CTRL/CMD>Z-ing on Saturday night. Along with some colourful language. But what caused my biggest headaches wasn’t the fault of the software… I had missed one tiny, crucial setting that had me questioning my sanity. I had overlooked the pixels/ centimeter setting that caused my layout to be ginormous, both in physical size and in file size. It should have been pixels/inch. Once I figured it out – long after the speed scrap was over and my layout was posted – I corrected my oversight and it was all good.

There are a couple of things I’ve discovered over the last few days that relate to scrapping with templates. I think we all agree that templates are amazing tools that actually stimulate our native creativity, rather than stifle it. So making version 15 template-friendly is high on my list.

First, as I mentioned in last week’s tutorial, PSE 15 doesn’t behave the way previous versions do when you drag-and-drop papers and objects onto the canvas. It has a habit of dropping things in seemingly random spots rather than on top of the last selected layer, meaning scrappers have to move their papers and objects up and down all the time. This is a serious time suck at first, and I’m all about working smart and not hard. So I played around a bit (a lot) to see how I could make it less labour-intensive.

I work the same way I would if I was paper-scrapping, bottom up. I wondered what would happen if I turned the visibility for all layers off but the background and then turned them back on one at a time as I worked my way up the template layers. That way I would know EXACTLY where my flowers, leaves, buttons, ribbons and assorted other bits were supposed to go. It would take away the whole trying-to-line-up-the-object-with-a-layered-place-holder-I-could-only-see-a-bit-of…-and-missing thing. I hoped. And for the most part, it worked perfectly. There were a couple of papers I missed with, but over all it reduced the layer moving by about 90%. If you’re the kind of scrapper who likes to put your photos in place first, this workaround would be easy to modify. Turn off everything but your photos, move them onto the layout and then carry on.

Clipping papers and photos to place-holders is still a work-in-progress while I reeducate my fingers. I know it’ll become a rote movement once muscle memory takes over. Did you know we require about 1,000 repetitions of a movement before it becomes automatic? We had to abandon the notion of teaching our son to use a motorized wheelchair when we realized he was never going to get enough practice in a short enough period of time for his motor planning to be good… he ran over his teaching assistant’s foot, knocked over several garbage cans, plowed straight into a bank of lockers and scraped paint from 3 different doorways all in the same day! Teaching my fingers CTRL/CMD>ALT/OPTION>G automatically is going to take me a while, but no one should get hurt.

While I’m on the subject of that keyboard shortcut, I stumbled on a way to make groups work for me while scrapping with a template. Sometimes the template designer will use paper place holders that would look best if they’re all cut from the same paper, but she’s put them on separate layers. The Tinci Designs template I used for my Buffet challenge layout is like that. As an experiment, I grouped three layers together using the CTRL/CMD>G keyboard shortcut, then put a paper on top of the spot in the layers panel where the group appeared and CTRL/CMD>ALT/Option>G’d it. The paper was clipped to all three layers in one move! I’m going to play around with that some more.

Pam and I have the same problem with seeing the edges of the bounding box. My excuse is that my eyes are old. The only solution – if we’re going to call it that – is that the arrows for resizing and rotating are so much bigger that when the mouse rolls over the box, they pop up and are easy to see. And that huge + sign is another good clue.

Another thing I observed, which may be my imagination (or wishful thinking) is that when I created shadows on their own layers using the second method I showed you, Elements seemed to blur the edges a little for me. I’m pretty sure it didn’t, but it sure looked like it! [The steps for creating a shadow on its own layer are: 1) Create a new layer UNDER the object you’re shadowing. CTRL/CMD click on the single sheet of paper icon. 2) Click on the layer thumbnail of the object you’re shadowing to select the edges. 3) Fill the selected area in your new layer with your shadow colour. 2C1902 is a good one to use. 4) Deselect the object. CTRL/CMD>D 5) Nudge the shadow layer to where it needs to be to match the other shadows on your layout. 6) Use a Gaussian blur filter to soften the edges. 7) Decrease the opacity of your shadow layer until it looks right. 8) Change the Blend mode for your shadow to Linear Burn. Then you can warp it to suit your self.]

I was really pleased to see so many comments on last week’s tutorial, and all the questions. Keep them coming!