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.

Scrapping in the Time of COVID

With apologies to Gabriel García Márquez… Let’s talk about why we scrap our memories. I think we all agree that we’re scrapbookers because we want to have tangible proof of events in our lives to take out and hold years from now when the events we’ve memorialized have been all but forgotten. Mostly, we want to hold onto the good times. But I really think we have to also honour the hard times. It’s those hard times that truly shape us and make us stronger, better humans. If we pretend the bad stuff didn’t happen, we’re not letting our future selves have pride in our resilience.

It seems every generation has an “event” – which is often a prolonged period and not just a brief moment in time – that changes everything. From war to natural disaster to pandemic, we’re forced to adapt to world-altering changes, otherwise the human race would die off. When I think of all the trials our ancestors endured, I marvel that we’re even here at all! COVID-19 is our crucible, our chamber of fire. In six short months our world looks completely different. My Facebook feed is filled with back-to-school photos, as it always is this time of year, but with a few major differences. Kids are wearing masks. Kids are learning their lessons through a computer screen. Some might see masks and think “awful”, “sad”, “ridiculous” or “overkill”, but I see humans adapting to a new environment and learning to evolve and survive. With that in mind, I decided to take a stroll through the Gallery to share some very hopeful and life-affirming layouts I found there.

8-24-2020 is a layout from MrsDebReynolds where the virus isn’t even mentioned. It’s there, but it’s not the focus. She mentions all the things the pandemic is bringing out in people: strength, courage, kindness, hope, love. And look at how this young lady totally rocks her mask!

2020 by dricamendes is another example of saying a lot without saying the words. I love the colour palette she chose for this, letting the sunflowers complement the girl’s t-shirt and the purple makes the photo pop. Life is different but it’s still beautiful.

I really love how the boys in knclarke‘s layout Best Buddies are just living life. With a few adjustments.

The kiddos in beatricemi‘s layout Checkers at the Fort haven’t let a pandemic get in the way of having fun. I bet they’re having a lot of giggles making faces at each other behind their masks, knowing that they can really only guess at what’s going on.

roxana has created a layout that I hope was cathartic for her. Dream Job Interrupted says it all, even without a translation for the journaling.

Air travel has probably changed forever, yet again. And this time it’s an invisible threat, rather than a shoe bomber… briannascrapper talks about how an Early Morning Flight that turned out not to be, and has photos of how different the airport looks with virus protocols in place.

Even having babies has changed, but the photos of new families can still be beautiful. AJsRandom has a new granddaughter and is celebrating her arrival in Little Blessing.

I love how Madison ignores the pandemic but embraces it at the same time. bkasko‘s photo makes me laugh.

One thing about humans… there will always be those who see a need and find a way to fill it. People like msbrad, who sewed more than 500 fabric masks and donated them to places where they were desperately needed.

We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t want to know when this will end. I think we’re not really going to see an “end”, we’ll just adapt over time and develop a New Normal, as stacsmiley has described. There’s still so much we don’t know about this virus, but we’re learning all the time.

What I really like about Princess Pi is that EvelynD2 totally ignores the mask on her face. It truly doesn’t make her any less beautiful!

It’s weirdly appropriate that my post will end with emscraps‘ layout Stay Safe. (It wasn’t intentional, just how my computer saved the layouts and then how WordPress ordered them.) Battle fatigue is setting in for everybody, but most especially for our essential services – health care, law enforcement, retail staff, service workers, delivery people. But we can’t give up now! Stay safe, everyone… and don’t let COVID-19 ruin our memories.

When the Tutor Becomes the Tutored

I’m starting to seriously hate Tuesdays! (Especially the ones where I’m running a little behind.) It seems every single week when I turn my laptop on to write up my tutorial, there’s some sort of automatic update – either an OS, driver or hardware update – and it takes. For. Ever. To. Finish. And then it messes up my software…… But I persevered!

Remember the heritage fonts tutorial from last week? I said I had some ideas about how to make those fonts into fancy illuminated titles. I just didn’t expect to be showing you one of them right away! But it had to have been Fate that on Saturday Karen Schulz, formerly known as Snickerdoodle Designs, had a video tutorial in her newsletter that caught my attention. I’m going to show you some of what I learned from it, giving credit where credit is due.

The font I used for this title is Silvus, one of the fonts I showed you last week. It has a bit of a Game-of-Thrones/Lord-of-the-Rings flavour to it with the dragons of the “M”, the horns of the “Y” and the heraldic symbolism in all the letters. And it’s perfect for showing you this amazing trick!!

Text remains a Smart Object (can’t be altered, just edited – if that makes sense) until the layer is Simplified. I want to make my title fancy and so it needs to be tweakable. Right-click on the layer in the Layers Panel then select Simplify Layer from the drop-down menu.

This little button is MAGIC! It Locks Transparency, meaning it keeps the background of your text, your brushes or your word art PNGs transparent and lets you “paint” JUST THE IMAGE!! The icon is hard to see in my screenshot, so I’ll describe it: a gridded “transparent” square with a lock image in front of it. Now that I know about this, I’m going to use it all the time.

I Zoomed in on my title so I can see exactly what I’m doing as I select colours. I want to start with the curlicues that look like vines, so I chose a green from the Color Picker for the Foreground colour. (I chose a darker green at first, but it wasn’t showing well on the screenshots.)

The next step was to go to my Brush tool. I chose a hard, round brush with a diameter of 36 pixels to start. I left all the other default settings as is. Remember, you can make your brush tip bigger by clicking the ] (right square bracket) and smaller by clicking the [ (left square bracket). If you’re getting “paint” on parts of your image where you don’t want it, Undo (CTRL/CMD>Z) and change your brush size.

See how cool that is?! All I did was brush over the vines with my brush tip and it ONLY painted the vines.

While I had my brush loaded with green, I looked over my title to see where else I could use it. There are other vines and leaves, so they got painted next.

Then I Picked a magenta colour for the flowers. One of them looks like a hibiscus, and magenta ones are my favourites.

All the flowers are going to be magenta.

I kept choosing colours that seemed appropriate for what I was painting, some blue, yellow and gold.

And some red and teal too. The dragons needed to be teal!

It was so much fun I just kept going.

Once I had the whole title coloured, I could have just saved it and called it a day. But y’all know me better than that! I’m always going to show you some more ways to zhuzh up your stuff. So I clicked Styles>Bevels and chose the Simple Emboss Bevel. That gives my title a bit of weight.

Again, it would be absolutely fine to save this version. But I want to show you one more little tweak. So I Copied (CTRL/CMD>J) the title layer.

The top layer really doesn’t need the Bevel, so I right-clicked on that layer and selected Clear Layer Style to remove the bevel from that layer.

I went back into the Styles menu and chose Glass Buttons>Transparent Glass (it looks like it’s gray, but it shows clear).

This is the default for the Style. It’s certainly shiny! This might be the look you like, and you could save it just like this. But it’s not the look I want. I could go into the Layer’s style menu and make adjustments, but for this it’s easy enough to make it less in-your-face.

Just by decreasing the top layer’s Opacity until there’s a sheen but it’s not blinding. I think it looks like cloisonée, don’t you?

All that was left to do was Merge (CTRL/CMD>E) the layers together and Save (CTRL/CMD>S).

Thanks Karen!! If you’d like to see the other two techniques she shared in her video and get some inspiration, you can find it here.