Quick Trick: Controlling Camera Shake

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If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a lot of “nice” photos that miss being GREAT photos because they’re a little blurry. Sometimes it’s a focus issue, sometimes it’s camera shake. Because there are times when you can’t just whip out a tripod and get those magic moments captured perfectly, you’re okay with compromising on clarity for the sake of the memory. Well, I think I’ve got something that might make those “nice” shots a lot less woozy! This automatic enhancement was introduced with Elements 14; if you’re working with an earlier version, sorry. 🙁

Let me introduce you to one of my new neighbours. She and her family were some distance away and it was super-cold outside so I didn’t want to go outside to take photos. I used the zoom lens – which destabilizes the camera a bit – on one of my point-and-shoot digital cameras and shot them through the living room window. I knew they’d be soft and a bit fuzzy, and I accepted that.

I didn’t know about this trick until last night. It’s going to be VERY useful! Click on the Enhance tab and scroll down to Shake Reduction…

Elements will automatically make an adjustment to your photo. You’ll get a little preview of what will happen, and you can fine-tune it later. See the slider labeled Sensitivity? You can tweak that too, but be careful. A little goes a long way! Make it too sensitive and you’ll see a white outline around your subject.

The important part of the photo is her face, so I’ve drawn a box around her head and chest, and Elements starts working on it. See that thing in the middle of the box? It’s a progress bar, showing you where in the process your photo is currently. When it’s finished the icon disappears. Then, if you’re happy, click OK.

Here’s the Before image up close.

And the After image up close.

And a side-by-side… The change is subtle, but visible. You can see it even in the foliage.

Not bad for a couple of clicks!

Coloured and Patterned Shadows

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When I saw this technique on another site, I was intriqued. The scrapper was using Photoshop, but I knew I could make it work just as well in Elements so I had to prove it to myself. This is the result!

This tutorial will be a review of how I create custom shadows, but with a twist. It will work best with a white/light coloured alpha or meaty font against a white or light-coloured solid background. The alpha I used is from the GingerBread Ladies‘ Dream Big collab and will be part of a layout created with JB Studio’s Farmhouse Winter. My layout was also created with this month’s Challenge template from Scrabookcrazy Creations by Robyn.

When I create a title with alphas, I usually put it together on its own canvas so I can easily tweak whatever needs tweaking without the distraction of all the rest of the layout. I usually go with a straight line +/- some individual height or angle changes for interest. But because this technique is a shadow trick, this time my working title is on an angle. The shadows on the title must lie in the same direction as the rest of the layout and the title will be on an angle on the finished layout. So…

Typically, once I’ve got the title the way I want it I shadow any overlapping areas and Merge the characters. But you’ll see that I’ve kept each character on its own layer and will keep them separate. This is important for later.* (If you’re using a font, you may want to put each letter on its own layer. Skip ahead to the * to see if that’s what you need to do.) The first step to a custom shadow is to Select the outline of the object. CTRL/CMD>click on the Layer Thumbnail – that little image of what you’ve put on a layer that shows at the left side of the layer in the Layers Panel.

Next, I add a new blank layer UNDER the working layer. The quickest way to do that is to hold down the CTRL/CMD key and click on the Create New Layer icon – the one that looks like a sheet of paper with one corner turned up.

Next, I set the foreground colour in the Color Picker to the colour I want for my shadows. If I’m using a template, I’ll match that to whatever the template designer has used. In this case, it’s just black. Using the Paint Bucket tool, I fill the outline of the letter on the blank layer. This is the Shadow layer.

Don’t be concerned that you can see a thin rim of black around your letter. It’s not going to make any difference to the final product.

Here is where this technique departs a bit from my usual custom shadow routine. I made a Copy layer of the SHADOW: right-click on the layer and choose Duplicate Layer… then click OK on the pop-up menu. The keyboard shortcut is CTRL/CMD>J.

I renamed the two shadow layers; the first, bottom one is Shadow, the top one just below the actual letter is Narrow Shadow. If you want to rename your layers, go to the Layers Panel and double-click on the name of the layer that you can see. Type in what you want it to be called and Enter. Then I turned the visibility of the NARROW SHADOW layer off.

I did this process for each of the letters in my title, creating two shadow layers and turning visibility for the one just underneath the letter itself off.

Now to give the Shadows an offset, which is a regular step in my custom shadow process: Activate each of the visible, bottom SHADOW layers by holding down the CTRL/CMD key and clicking on each layer all the way up the pile. This lets me move all the Shadows in one movement so they match.

For the most realistic look all the shadows on a layout lie in the same direction and give dimension to the objects above them. The shadow Styles on the template I used are at 60° (I flipped the template horizontally, and the shadows flipped too.) To know the exact angle of light on a template double-click on the fx symbol on one of the template’s layers and it’ll show up in the pop-up.

Now to soften the Shadows. So far I haven’t found a way to do this step in a batch, so I processed each layer individually. First step is to add a Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur…

Elements provides a Preview of the Filter effect. If you don’t see anything in the Preview pane, click your cursor on the edge of your Shadow. It’ll appear in the pane. Or you can just watch what’s happening on the canvas. Using the slider, adjust the amount of Blur the Filter adds. I want them to be quite soft, so I used a Radius of 6.5 pixels. Elements also “saves” the settings of the most recent Filter used, which makes it easy to add that Filter to multiple layers. Simply click Filter>Last Filter. The keyboard shortcut for that is CTRL/CMD>F. One step!

Next, I changed the Blend Mode to Linear Burn. This mode makes the shadow transparent so the layers below are visible – just like a real shadow!

Then to tone the harshness down a bit more, I decreased the Opacity of the Shadow layer to 70%. This step is also subject to personal preference. If you try this and 70% doesn’t look good to you, find what does! It can also be further adjusted later.

This is what the title looks like with each of the Shadow layers Blurred and lightened. I could stop here and be quite happy. But this tutorial is about coloured and patterned shadows, so onward ho!

Yes. You’re not seeing things. I’m going to Clip a patterned paper to the Shadow layer under my “O”.

Doesn’t that look neat?

I Clipped a different* patterned paper to each letter, using the same paper for the two “E”s and went with the green houndstooth for the ellipsis at the end. If you want to use the same patterned paper for all your letters, you could Merge all the alpha layers/not separate the characters if using a font then do all of the preceding steps on your title as a unit.

Okay, so once I had all the Shadows coloured, I decided they looked a little anemic. So I increased the Opacity of each Shadow layer to 80%. That looks better to me.

Now to add just a tiny bit more definition to that alpha. I’ve made all the Narrow Shadow layers visible again and activated them by CTRL/CMD>clicking on each layer. A little nudging in the same 60° direction as the coloured shadows – just a little! – gives each letter an actual shadow.

Again, they’re pretty sharp and harsh so Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur first.

But because these ones are a lot closer to the objects they’re shadowing, the Blur should be less pronounced. I went with a Radius of 3.0 pixels.

I didn’t need to decrease the Opacity of these shadows. They look just right to me!

Here’s my finished layout. The technique isn’t really obvious, so you might want to work on a larger scale, with a bit more space around your title if you choose to try this. I’m really pleased with my layout as is.

Five days until the first night of Hanukkah, twelve days until Christmas, thirteen until Kwanzaa and nineteen until next year… is everybody as behind on EVERYTHING as I am? Thinking about it exhausts me. But I have an amusing little anecdote I want to share. On Saturday one of my former coworkers (the very last one I saw before I moved away, to be exact) posted to Facebook that her maternal grandmother had passed away. She linked to her Baba’s obituary. Where’s the fun part, you ask? Well, it turns out we’re RELATED! Distantly and by marriage, but still!! Her maternal great-grandfather’s first wife was my great-grand-aunt’s sister-in-law. There are a couple of other spots where our roots intertwine too, that I’ll be untangling over the next while. We ended up talking on the phone for an hour and a half; she said finding out we’re “cousins” was the best thing to happen to her all month.

Before I forget… There was a comment on the cardmaking tut from a few weeks back from Lisa. She said she uses Royal Brites Matte Photo paper to print hers. I couldn’t find any locally, but was able to buy some Staples premium matte photo paper and printed my cards with it. OMG!!!! The difference00 is HUGE!! Thanks and a shout-out to Lisa!!

Next week we’ll be checking out the Challenge Spotlight and the final tutorial of the year is a Quick Trick you’re going to LOVE! See you soon!!

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Don’t Let Your Text “FLOAT”!

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Have you ever wanted to run some text across an element, like a piece of washi tape, a paper ribbon, or even just over a crease in your digital paper, but then look at it and think, “Well that looks like garbage…”? Odds are you feel that way because the text isn’t grounded to the element and looks like it’s floating. Kathi (granny5pics) was in that situation and asked if I could help. This is it!

My example uses a piece of crumpled washi from Cheré Kaye‘s portion of the Beautiful Struggle collab she created with Aimee Harrison and Cindy Ritter, and a very creased label from Cindy Ritter‘s Autumn Treasures. Killing two birds with one stone, as it were.

After I typed out my text and positioned it where I wanted it, I Simplified the layer so that Elements will allow my changes. My method for Simplifying is to right-click on the layer then choose Simplify Layer. It can also be achieved by clicking Layer>Simplify Layer.

Next, I chose the Dodge Tool – the one that looks like the paddle the optometrist uses to close one of your eyes. This tool lightens the area it’s used upon; I like to start with less, then work my way up to more. My settings were Range: Highlights, Exposure: 30% (I adjusted that after I took the screenshot) and 45 pixels for my brush size. Note that I’m working on the text layer, not the tape layer, so the changes I make will only affect the text. I ran the Dodge brush over the parts of the text that are over top of areas where the light creates highlights, the creases on both the tape and the label. For straight lines like the creases in the label, click your Tool at one end of the area you’re working on, hold down the SHIFT key and click just past the other end. Don’t worry about going past the edges of the text; the Tool will only affect the layer you’re on. If you have text that crosses the same crease on multiple lines, you can do all of them in one pass.

Next I switched to the Burn Tool, the “OK” sign, and used similar settings. This tool darkens areas where it’s used. Again, I like to build the effect, because it’s easier to see when to stop. This time, I ran the brush over areas where the text crosses shadowed areas of the tape and the label. I adjusted the Size of the brush to suit the width of the shadowed areas by using the [ key to make it smaller, the ] key to make it larger. Zooming in and out let me see if I needed to go over any areas again.

Here’s a close-up. The arrows point out the areas where I’ve made my adjustments. I can see some dimension beginning to be visible.

I kept Dodging and Burning until I was satisfied. Then I planned how I was going to show the edge of the tape where the ink from my pen wouldn’t have reached the paper below.

The tear at the left edge of the tape is jagged so to help me out, I CTRL/CMD>clicked on the tape layer’s thumbnail to Select the edge, but kept the text layer as my active layer. Then I used a very small Eraser brush to erase a narrow bit of my text. I also shaved a thin strip along the bottom edge of the tape.

If I’d decided it still needed something, I could have used the Smudge Tool – the flying fickle finger of Fate – to gently push the top edge of the text toward the high crease on the tape, knowing that the Smudge Tool blurs the image a bit. But it looked right to me so this is what I’m happy with.

Here’s a Zoomed out look. Can you see the way the text seems to follow the contours of the tape and the creases in the label?

Here they are, side-by-side. I think you’ll all see it now!

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Quick Trick: Auto Colour Correction

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With Thanksgiving looming over all our American members, it’s pretty convenient that today’s regularly-scheduled tutorial is a Quick Trick.

Today’s Quick Trick is another CS/CC-to-PSE workaround. Colour correction can be a bit of a time suck in Elements. But this little trick is brilliant! It uses an Adjustment Layer to accomplish in a couple of steps what can take MANY steps in any other method. The colours in this photo were so much more vivid in real life and just didn’t make it into the camera. So let’s give it a whirl.

Click Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Levels. All changes to the photo will happen on the new layer, so if you don’t like the change you can save the original as is.

I like to Clip the mask to the previous layer. It isn’t essential, but it does ensure that the two layers move as one. Click OK. The dialog box in the upper corner will come into play in the next step.

To access this hidden menu, hold down the ALT/OPT key then click the Auto button. As the screenshot says, the default setting is Enhance Per Channel Contrast. For this tutorial we’ll select Find Dark & Light Colors and Snap Neutral Midtones. You’ll see what’s happening to the image in real time behind the dialog box. If you think you might use this trick again, it can be set as a default so that when you click Auto in the Adjustment Layer menu, Elements will automatically do all these steps.

Here’s the result. It’s subtle, but definitely better. The artemesia in the background is whiter, the pink coneflower is pinker, the centaurea montana is bluer, there’s more definition in the leaves and the green cast is gone! No tinkering, just boom!

Since I’ve gotten some feedback about a side-by-side look, here it is!

That’s it. That’s all! Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating this week. And remember, football is just a game…

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