When Is a Square NOT a Square?

When it’s a rectangle! Two of my fellow Sugar Cookies asked me to talk to you all about how to manipulate frames so they better fit photos that aren’t the same dimensions… but without distorting the frame itself. EvaMarie (mskinsey) and Jen (hclappy), this one’s for you!

The basic principles of this trick work in reverse as well, so don’t think you can only go in one direction. But for today, I’m going to turn this square frame below into a rectangle with a few easy steps. You’ve probably all tried to s-t-r-e-t-c-h a frame only to find that the pieces you’ve elongated are now skinnier and look funny compared to the sides you didn’t play with. And who wants that?!

It’s really noticeable when you use a striped frame like this one. You can see how skinny the top part of the frame is compared to the side, and the stripes…

ONE CAVEAT: The more detailed and complex the frame, the less likely you’ll be happy with the results. So choose a frame with obvious pattern repeats having enough space between details to allow this trick to work for you.

The frame in the screenshot is from Ooh La La Scraps‘ gorgeous In the Frosty Air collection, which is one of my favourites (and is on sale for the fire-sale price of $5!!).

The first thing to do is resize the canvas the frame is on. You want to do this so you have lots of room to make your changes, and so you can see what you’re doing. To me this is about the most important way to ensure I’m doing things well… so I use Zoom In and Zoom Out ALL THE TIME. (W[ork]S[mart]N[ot]H[ard] tip: Ctrl/CMD>+ to magnify, CTRL/CMD>- to shrink)

You can follow the steps as shown below or you can WSNH: CTRL/CMD>ALT/OPT>C.

Key in some numbers in the boxes as shown. You can always resize the canvas again if you find it’s still too small.

The actual size you go to doesn’t matter too much, you just want your canvas to be larger – in the direction you want to stretch your frame – than your frame.

Now select your Rectangle Marquee tool.

Select an area of your frame using the Rectangular Marquee tool as shown. Pick a specific detail of any pattern repeat so when you line things up later you won’t have too much cleaning up to do. I made two of the darker lines my reference points.

Next, Cut your selection out of the middle of your frame. WSNH: CTRL/CMD>X

And you get something that looks like this.

… you can Paste that chunk back onto the canvas for further manipulation. WSNH: CTRL/CMD>V

Now select the left side of the original frame, down there on the bottom layer and repeat the process of cutting and pasting so the three pieces are all on their own layer.

So now it’s time to reposition the two sides of the original frame using the Move tool so that there’s a nice big gap between them.

Take the guesswork out of aligning your layers by selecting all of them then with the Move tool still selected, go down to the control panel underneath your work space. You can use these quick little buttons to align whatever part of several layers that you want. The software will move all the layers into alignment based on the little boxes you see on your bounding box. These buttons can be really handy for aligning alphas, buttons, rows of stitches, paper strips, ribbons, you name it. (And… the Distribute buttons will do something similar, making the spaces between objects the same.) You have to click on the ICON, not the aspect. So go ahead and click on Align>Bottom. Boom!

If the section of frame that you cut out in several steps back isn’t as big as you need it to be*, Duplicate that bit. WSNH: CTRL/CMD>J 

* Put your photo on the workspace and move it to the bottom layer then shift the pieces around to see if the frame will be big enough. You can leave it there when you’ve got the outside edges in place, just turn the visibility off so it doesn’t distract you.

Now you have four layers with frame sections on them. Move the two cut pieces so that the ends butt up against the outside edges. Don’t be alarmed if they don’t match exactly.

When all the edges are butted together with no gaps and most of the details lined up, Merge the layers together. WSNH: CTRL/CMD>E

Sometimes all that’s needed is a little Spot Healing. That’s the band-aid icon in your Tools panel. Use a soft round brush just a little bit bigger than the area you want to blend and click away. Watch carefully so you don’t accidentally make things worse. If you see a whoops, just Undo it. WSNH: CTRL/CMD>Z… my best friend.

But sometimes a little more aggressive editing is necessary. For that you’ll use the Clone Stamp tool. It’s the “rubber stamp” icon just under the Spot Healing tool. To choose the area to be cloned, you’ll need to watch closely when you hold down the ALT/OPT key and click. A little cross hair will show up on your work space that shows you what little section of your image it’s going to copy. When you’re working with stripes like I was, you want to have that sampling spot on the edge of a stripe. Once you’ve “defined your sample” you can very carefully line up your cursor with the area to tweak and click. Do this as often as needed until your two pieces are blended together seamlessly.

Below you can see the result after a couple of clicks. I’ve only worked on the navy stripe so far in this image. I kept on going, carefully cloning the stripes until the seams disappeared.

Work your way around the frame, zooming in as much as you need to so you see what’s happening with your clicks. Just to be sure you’ve made the seams invisible, check again all the way around a couple of times, either cloning or spot healing as needed.

Ta-DA!! Virtually invisible seams, a much larger rectangular frame and it only took about 10 minutes of real time to do. Honest!

You’ll see this frame again next week when the topic is building a frame cluster without a template.

Remember, if you’ve used a technique from these tutorials, post your finished layout in the GingerScraps Facebook Tutorial Tuesday Challenge Gallery for an opportunity to have YOUR chance to challenge me. (I apologize for putting the Challenge Gallery in an inaccessible spot, so we’re starting fresh from NOW. All previous entries are still in the running.) If you’re not a Facebooker, you can post a link to the layout you’ve created with the tutorial you used in the comments section here on the Blog. I’ll get a notification and will then enter you into the draw. The first week of March I’ll have a random draw of all entries and the winner will be announced at the end of the first tutorial of the month. 

See you all next week!

Only the Shadows Knows… Take TWO

Holy moly! Where did January go? I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the faster time flies.

Two weeks ago I showed you one way to work around PSE’s blah shadows by cutting and pasting it onto its own layer so it can be tweaked to look more real. Today I want to show you another way to do that, along with a quick little trick for adding even MORE realism to your images. If you’re thinking you’ve already seen this tut, you are experiencing a little bit of déjà-vu but only that I’ve made this layout do double duty. (Remember, it’s a lot better to Work Smart Not Hard – WSNH!) I’m using this lovely ribbon and a paper from Seatrout Scraps‘ gorgeous Linen and Lace collection (retired).

I decided I wanted to play with this ribbon after I’d already constructed my layout, so to see what was happening to it, I turned off visibility of all the other layers as you can see in the screenshot below. Then I clicked on the Layer thumbnail in the Layers panel to get my marching ants around the ribbon.

Then I clicked on that little circle icon at the top of the Layers panel that is half blue and half light gray and has a little triangle next to it. That’s how you create a Fill Layer quickly and easily. (WSNH!) I chose Solid Color and then with the Color Picker I chose a gray.

In order to play with the shadow, the next step is to Simplify the layer. You can also rename the layer to help you remember what it is. I’ll confess I don’t often bother. Note that for the moment, this shadow layer is still ABOVE the ribbon, which isn’t visible because it’s covered up.

Okay, so now we can soften the edges of this new shadow layer, and we’ll do that with a Gaussian Blur Filter. Turn the visibility of the ribbon off so you can see exactly what’s happening.

You can see what is happening with your shadow both in the preview pane of the Gaussian Blur menu and on your layout as you move the slider left or right. Just play with it until you like the way it looks.

We haven’t actually touched on Blend Modes yet, partly because it’s a more advanced topic, and partly because we haven’t done anything needing a Blend Mode… until now. The menu for this handy, dandy tweak is found right at the top of the Layers panel under the other icons we’ve used before. Shadows look best when they’re a Multiply or Linear Burn, which I like better, so I selected that.

To keep working on natural and realistic, I decreased the opacity of my shadow to about 50% of its original appearance.

Looks pretty good, right?? Oh wait! We can make it even better! But to do that we need to see the ribbon itself, so turn the visibility for that layer back on, and move the shadow underneath it. WSNH tip: Ctrl/CMD+[ will do that for you. Then you can shift the shadow according to where your light source is coming from on your other layers.

The next tweak we’re going to make is to change the colour of the shadow itself. Because let’s face it, a black or gray shadow isn’t really what one would see against a pink paper. You can make your shadow colour similar to whatever it’s falling on by selecting that colour with your eye dropper Color Picker tool then moving the eye dropper to the right and down to choose a deeper, richer hue of the same colour. Make sense? You can go ahead and choose your colour first but before you move on, lock the transparency of your shadow layer by clicking on the icon shown below.

For my shadow, I chose a colour from the paint splatter I used and then adjusted it as I described above.

Now, with your shadow layer selected and locked down, click ALT/OPT+ Delete and bingo! Your shadow colour is transformed!

Now we can play with how the ribbon touches the paper. So click on the Image tab then Transform>Distort. Skew will work, but it doesn’t give you as much control. To distort your shadow, you’ll pull or push on the handles as shown in the screenshots below.

Pulling will move the shadow out and down in the direction you’ve chosen, while pushing movies it in and up.

The last thing you have to remember is to link the layers together by clicking on that little chain symbol so that when you move one, the other moves too. I know it seems like a lot of steps, but you can do all of this in less than a minute once you’ve got the steps down.

While we’re talking about shadows and the colour of shadows, a loyal GingerScrapper named Jen (hclappy in the gallery and forum) asked about shadowing elements against black or dark coloured papers. Obviously, using a black or dark gray shadow isn’t going to make much of a visual impact. So when I have a dark background, I’ll use a slightly brown shadow just to make some differentiation of colour. If you’re using drop shadow styles, they’re usually already a brownish shade, but if you find you’re not seeing them well, you’ll have to change each layer’s shadow colour individually. Unfortunately there isn’t a WSNH trick for that… I looked. You CAN, however, change one layer style colour then select like items (all your papers or flowers, for example) and shadow them all at once with your new colour by right-clicking with all your layers selected then selecting Paste Layer Style. Then it’s just a matter of tweaking where you see fit to make it all esthetically pleasing. That’s the goal, after all!

So far there is only one entry into the Tutorial Challenge. If you use any of the techniques or tips I’ve shown you this month, post your work to the GingerScraps Facebook fanpage Challenge Gallery, or if you’re not a Facebooker, you can post a link in the comments here for me. Then I can enter you into a draw to have your very own personal tutorial right here in February.

Next week, we’re going to talk about clusters and what to do if you don’t want to use a template but want an awesome cluster or two. Stay tuned!

Heritage Photos Get a Makeover!

Ever wondered how other scrappers got that subtle-but-lush, hand-tinted look to their black-and-white photos? It’s super-easy, doesn’t take long and adds a really elegant look to your images. I’ll show you how, using this lovely 100-year-old photo of my great-grand aunt Ethel.

I started by making 4 copies of my photo, for a total of 5 layers. I selected my Brush tool and a royal blue from the Colour Picker. The eyes are done on my top layer because they’re the feature I want to have the most control over in this process. ZOOM in a LOT.

For eyes, I like to use a round, soft mechanical pencil brush. The edges of the brush are softened a little, which lets a tiny bit of the underlying layer to outline the area being brushed over. The size should be small enough to fit inside the area and allow for complete coverage. 9 pixels worked well for me. I painted over her irises with that blue colour I chose earlier. One thing to keep in mind: If you’re brushing over an area with an opacity of less than 100%, do all of your brushing in one action, with the left mouse button clicked the whole time. Otherwise, wherever your brushstrokes overlap the colour will be darker.

This is what her eyes looked like after I’d covered both irises completely with blue. Freaky and unnatural!

By pulling the Opacity of this layer down to 32% I could make the eyes look soft and let some sparkle through in the catch-lights.

Turn off the top layer before you move on. It eliminates distraction and gives you a clearer view of the changes you’re making on the layer underneath it. Bye-bye, blue eyes.

I’m still going to use the blue for the ribbon around her neck. I want the edges of my brush to be sharper, so I chose a hard mechanical pencil brush, and it could be a little bigger because I was covering a larger area. In the Brush settings it shows the Opacity as 60%, but I changed it to 100% before I did my painting because I knew I’d have to adjust the size of my brush to get into the tiny corners. I didn’t want those lap marks to show.

Very garish! But infinitely adjustable.

I decreased the Opacity to 45% – I left it just a little darker than I wanted my finished ribbon to look, because when I turn on all the layers again, the layers above are going to add their opacity adjustment to everything below.

The next item I painted was this brooch, on the centre layer. It was this that let me date the photo. I know Great-Grand Aunt Ethel had her first child, a boy she named George Albert, in April, 1913. I used a gold-yellow for it.

With the Opacity decreased to 35%, it doesn’t look nearly so tawdry. And you can read the embossed lettering better too.

On to the lips… second-to-last layer.

I liked this rosy pink for her lips and cheeks. Did you know that your blush will be the same hue as your lips, but slightly less saturated?

100% opacity. Clown school, any one?

Opacity decreased to 34%. Much better!

To blush her cheeks on the very bottom layer, I used a round spray brush – darker at the centre and gradually fading toward the edges – I found for free at Brusheezy.com. But having a circular patch of colour on our cheeks is really and truly clown-school unnatural. So I adjusted the shape/roundness and angle of the brush to match the contours of her left cheek. Did you know that you can “see” the outlines of your brush just by hovering the tool over your image? That’s how you adjust these settings.

First blush. Notice how all the other layers are not visible.

To do the other cheek I adjusted the brush angle to its negative value but left the roundness alone.

Yes, she looks very embarrassed.

I left the opacity exactly as is, at 100% and turned on all the rest of my layers. And magically, her face just looks pretty, with a hint of colour in her cheeks and on her lips. As long as you haven’t merged your layers, you can tweak the opacity of your colours on each layer until you’re in love with the result. Just remember that a light touch gives the best result.

It really is that simple! I bet you have a favourite black-and-white photo you want to try this with. Have fun!!

Below is just a quick-and-easy mini-tut especially for mskinsey. She wanted to know how to apply a border around photos and other items. So here you go…

My photo extended a long way past the edges of my frame. I used the Elliptical Marquee tool to select an elliptical area on my photo layer that just overlaps the edge of the inner area of the frame where the photo goes. Then I inverted the selection [CTRL/CMD>SHIFT>I] and cut away the rest of the photo [CTRL/CMD>X]. That makes the next step super-easy. I just clicked on the layer thumbnail for my photo and that selected the outside edge of my ellipse.

I clicked on the Select tab then chose Modify>Contract from the pop-down menu.

I first typed in “15” but it didn’t give me enough space between the frame and the marching ants, so I changed the number to “30“.

With my marching ants now 30 pixels inside the frame (you can see them peeking around the left upper edge of the menu box) I clicked on the Edit tab, then Stroke (Outline) Selection and entered the width and colour I wanted to use. I also chose for the stroke to go inside the marching ants. That’s a personal preference.

And that’s all it takes!

Next week I’m going to show you another way to play with shadows on their own layer, using the same layout, which is my January Color Challenge entry. (I’m all about working smart, not hard!) Take a look and see if you can guess what we’re going to do…

Don’t forget! If you use any of the techniques or tips I’ve shown you this month, post your work to the GingerScraps Facebook fanpage Challenge Gallery, or if you’re not a Facebooker, you can post a link in the comments here for me. Then I can enter you into a draw to have your very own personal tutorial right here in February.

Yes! You CAN Warp Shadows in PSE!

Photoshop Elements is a great program for most applications the average digi-scrapper wants to accomplish, but it does have limitations. One of these is that shadows aren’t on their own layer. That means getting your photos or other objects to look like they’re lifting off the page isn’t possible. Or is it…….? Actually, there are a couple of ways to move your drop shadows onto a separate layer and the one I’m going to show you today is the one I find to be the easiest.

I wanted to have a photo lift at one corner within my layout for the Mix It Up challenge this month. I chose a template created by Krisztina of Tinci Designs, found in her Autumn Stories V.2 collection. Krisztina’s templates come pre-shadowed, which makes them especially awesome for beginners.

To start the process of making this photo spot look like it’s lifting, first I had to move the shadow onto its own layer. To do that, double-click on the little fx icon as shown below. That opens the Layer Style menu for that layer.

It looks like this. By moving the Distance slider to the right, the shadow is offset – it moves away from the item.

To make the process easier I temporarily changed the angle on the shadow to 180°, which moved the shadow off to the right of the photo spot. (This step might not be necessary, depending on the size of your item and its location on the page. This photo spot is in the lower left corner, so I was a little restricted in what I could do with it.) You’ll see that I also set the distance to 1000 pixels. This gives me some space between the shadow and the photo spot, which is essential to make this technique work. Once I’m done moving the shadow to its own layer I’ll move it back into position at the same angle as the other photo spots.

Now that I’ve set the distance, it’s time to Simplify the layer. VITAL STEP!! Right click on the layer in the Layers panel and select Simplify Layer. That effectively eliminates the fx icon so you can manipulate the visible layer on your layout.

Select the Rectangle Marquee tool then click and drag a rectangle around the shadow portion of your image as shown.

Now I’m going to Cut that shadow away from the photo spot. Edit>Cut or CTRL/CMD+X will do it.

Now Edit>Paste (CTRL/CMD+V) the shadow back onto the layout… and look! It’s on its own layer!

Elements will have put the shadow layer ABOVE the item, so move it down so it’s underneath where it belongs. You can click and drag the layer down or CTRL/CMD+[ will do it for you. Now you can shift the shadow back to its correct angle under the photo/item.

Now we’re getting into the really fun part! Select Image>Transform>Skew.

I grabbed the lower left handle (the little box at the corner) and pulled it to the left. See how the bounding box looks wonky? That’s the Skew in action. Then I clicked OK.

There’s another way of changing the shape of an item. Image>Transform>Distort give a little more variety to how the shape can be altered.

Looking at the new shadow, it looks like the photo is resting on something underneath it and it’s too umm… ordinary. So the next step is to nudge the edges of the shadow a little so it’s closer to the photo in some areas. The Smudge tool is the way to make that happen. It looks like a finger.

Using a fairly big setting, click and drag the Smudge tool along the edge of the shadow, positioning the tool’s cursor something like shown below. Don’t take it all the way to the very end of the shadow though, because then it’ll have a tail and it’s not going to make you happy.

The image below shows what happens when you get carried away. It’s very bizarre looking and NOT what I want at all. Rather than try to correct it, I undid (CTRL/CMD+Z) back to where I was still liking the look, and then continued.

Now that’s more like it!

And for that final touch of realism I hit the Image>Transform>Distort again and pushed the corner of the PHOTO (see that the photo layer is the active one) in just a tiny bit. You can see the final result in the gallery. The effect is subtle but it’s there.

Think about how you could apply this new skill to a paper item you’ve stapled to your layout. You can use the Smudge tool to bring the shadow in really close to the edge of the paper where the staple is for a much more realistic look. It also lets you make your photo look like it’s cupped a little and the centre of the photo is closest to the paper. This technique can be used to adjust shadows for a lot of things other than paper too. Flowers, butterflies, string, ribbon, the sky’s the limit! Give it a shot and let me know how you like it!

Journaling INside the Box!

Greetings GingerScrappers! I’m hoping against hope the big server swap-out goes smoothly and quickly so nobody misses out on anything around here. I’m actually at work today – but you know nurses are capable of being in two places at one time (or at least the hospital thinks we are…) so you’re still going to get your dose of PSE instruction. Today we’re going with something really simple and straight-forward. Carol (user name gnana) requested a lesson on putting text inside a shape. Sadly with PSE, we’re limited to the custom shapes available within the software, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still be creative! So let’s have a look…

I was putting together a Chanukah layout for the January Recipe Challenge the other day, using Tracey Monette‘s (aka Clever Monkey Graphics) Hanukkah Oy kit and wanted to put my journaling inside a Star of David. (I made this tag out of an element and some paper.) See how I’ve selected the Custom Shape Tool below? The pop-up menu will automatically give you the Default Shapes so go ahead and select Show All then pick a shape that’s close to the one you want to journal within.

The best the software could do for me was a sheriff’s badge. So I went with that. I put my cursor on the tag then left-click>dragged out the shape to the size I wanted. (Make the shape as large as you can without extending past the edges of your item. You can always reposition it once you’ve got the shape and size you want.) The shape will then appear in your Layers Panel.

I don’t know about you, but I have a gazillion fonts and choosing the one I want to use is painfully difficult. So when I heard about wordmark.it I knew I’d use it a LOT! All you do is go to the website and pop some of your text into the box at the centre of the black band at the top. The site will then show you what it looks like in every font on your hard drive. How awesome is that?

Once I decided on the font I wanted to use (which isn’t the one shown in the screenshot… I actually used one called Worship Display, which seemed to be an appropriate choice) I made sure Horizontal Type Tool was selected. Then when I moved my cursor over to the shape layer, I got a slightly modified text cursor that looks a little like I’ve shown you below. That’s how you know it’s going to do what you want.

Sizing your text will determine how well your text fills the space. I could have gone smaller with the font, used more words and extended my text a little closer to the edges but the shape wasn’t huge and I wanted to be able to read it. You may well have to adjust what you want to say to make sure it all fits inside your shape. See how my text fits neatly and has a nice border around it?

I zoomed out a bit so you can see the entire text and how it fits.

Of course, I don’t want that white sheriff’s badge to stay there. When I turn the visibility of the shape layer off, my text remains and is still exactly where I put it. So guess what! That layer can just be deleted altogether. Cool, right?

So now you can go ahead and make your own tag shapes for journaling and have a polished look to your finished layout. The easiest way to do that is to create a shape. Then make a copy of that shape (CTRL/CMD+J) and simplify them (right-click on the layer>Simplify Layer) so you can play with them. Make the bottom one a little larger than the one on top so you have a nice border. Then clip papers to each layer. Bingo!

I hope you’re having fun learning new tricks! See you all next week.

Sizzling Signatures!

It’s a brand new month, a brand new year and it’s time for a brand new siggie. Signatures… we all have one. Our online presence is greatly enhanced by having a pretty one, or an intriguing one, or a sizzling one. The January 2017 Signature Challenge hosted by CathyK Designs asks us to use glitter in our signature and there’s so many ways we can do that. (psst…. any text that is bold and green is linked to the very spot in the forum, store or gallery I’m talking about… you can just click on it and you’re there!) I know there are some of you who find creating signatures to be a daunting thought – largely due to the very teenytiny size required – so I’m going to give you some tips on making yours fabulous. The guidelines given for these files is that they can’t be bigger than 750 x 150 pixels. But who can create in a space that small? I sure can’t. So I start out with a file size FIVE TIMES the guideline size so I can see what the heck I’m doing.

As I’ve mentioned before, this is my own workflow and it works for me, so don’t feel like you have to follow these instructions to the letter – they aren’t INSTRUCTIONS, they’re SUGGESTIONS. Anyway, I like to make a folder for each of my challenge layouts where I collect all the items I want to use in one place. I copy the elements and alphas from their original folders into the new dedicated folder, as I’ve shown below. Then it’s a simple matter of highlighting all the items in the folder and opening them all at once, as a batch.

As you can see, I’m using a kit from Ooh La La Scraps called In the Frosty Air. I chose this one because it has glittery paper in it and because Katie almost always has an alphabet or six and a collection of styles that coordinate with her collections. My name is short, so I like to use an alpha or font with some presence. This one worked for me. If your name has quite a few letters, you can use a skinnier alpha and still make a statement about who you are. Spacing is up to you, whatever is pleasing to your eye. See that I have all three letter layers selected. This is because I want to centre the letters on my palette; I can move them all together without messing up my spacing.

The easiest way to centre a group of items like this is to pull a guideline out to the centre of the workspace. It’s a bit hard to see it in the image below so I used a honking huge arrow. If you’ve never used a guideline before here’s how: Put your cursor right on the edge of your workspace –  either the very top, where I have a ruler visible, or on the left side, where I also have a ruler that isn’t shown below – then click and drag until you’ve got it where you want it. You can also see that I’ve merged my letter layers into a single layer.

I want to put a glitter paper border around my alpha to jazz it up and to meet the challenge criteria. I messed up my screenshots, so let’s pretend I’ve already dragged my glittery paper onto the workspace. Now I’m going to create an outline of my alpha by selecting the edges – clicking on the Layer Thumbnail. That puts some marching ants around the edges.

Then I clicked on Select>Modify>Expand to create a nice border around my alpha.

The pop-up menu looks like this. I chose 20 pixels, after some trial and error. Just enter a number in the box then see what it looks like. You can always CTRL/CMD+Z out of anything you’re not happy with.

See where the marching ants are now? 20 pixels gives me a nice border, visible but not overpowering.

While I still had the alpha layer highlighted, I inverted the selection, since I want to “cut” the excess paper away from my outline. Clicking on Select>Inverse in the Tabs is the same as CTRL/CMD+Shift+I.

Don’t forget to change the selected layer to the glittery paper. If you forget, when you Edit>Cut (CTRL/CMD+X) you’ll just delete your alpha from its layer. Not what you’re going for.

So now I have a glittery border around my name. I went ahead and added the various elements I chose for my siggie and was pretty happy with it. BUT… I decided I wanted to glitter up one of the snowflakes in the scatter I used. So I duplicated (CTRL/CMD+J) the layer. Using the Elliptical Marquee tool I selected one of the large snowflakes from the duplicated layer then Cut it (CTRL/CMD+X) and Pasted (CTRL/CMD+V) it onto its own layer. I turned the visibility of the two scatter layers off so I could see what I had. Oh, there’s a sequin there. Don’t want to glitter that up, it’s already glittery! So I created a Layer Mask by clicking on the blue rectangle at the top of the Layers panel. The mask is that white strip to the right of the Layer Thumbnail. You’re probably asking why I didn’t just use the Eraser tool to erase the sequin. I could do that, but if I accidentally had a dog land on my laptop as I was erasing and I erased most of the snowflake too, I’d have to go back to the beginning of the process. This way, if I erase too much, I can paint whatever I didn’t want gone back in. Remember, white conceals and black reveals.

With the Eraser tool and a white foreground colour, I carefully erased the sequin. If I’d slipped and took off one of the points on my snowflake, changing the foreground colour to black (the X key does that for me without having to click on the little bidirectional arrow) and un-erasing over that spot will bring it back. Once I had the sequin erased and the snowflake all perfect, the layer had to be Simplified. Right-click somewhere in the blue area on the selected layer then choose Simplify Layer.

Next I opened up my Effects Panel and chose the Glitter Style from Ooh La La Scraps’ In the Frosty Air styles menu. I decided I wanted the aqua fine glitter style and double-clicked on it to apply it to my snowflake. Woohoo!

Then I went ahead and deleted the duplicated layer of the snowflake scatter… the one that I had cut the snowflake from. The original snowflake scatter layer is visible again too.

Then I shadowed all my layers so they’d have some nice oomph. Don’t forget this step! You still want your siggie to look three dimensional and pretty.

When you love how your name looks with all its finery around it, it’s time to shrink it to fit the guidelines. You can follow the steps shown below, or go the quick way with a keyboard shortcut (CTRL/CMD+ALT+I).

These are the settings I recommend. Make sure you’ve checked those boxes at the bottom. When you do it this way, you can change the pixel counts and all the other settings automatically change too. This is helpful for posting to the gallery, because you can just resize your image to 600×600 this way.

See how teensy the image is now? But I promise, the details have been totally preserved. I like my siggie to have a transparent background. If you save it as a JPEG, it will have a white background. So what I do is select Save As…  (CTRL/CMD+Shift+S).

In the Save As menu, I choose PNG and give it a name that I’ll be able to recognize later. And I save it into the same folder I had all my elements in already. Gotta keep it all together in one place…

The PNG menu looks like this. Just save it as I’ve shown.

Now you can add your signature to your GingerScraps Forum profile! First, post your siggie to your gallery. Open up GingerScraps in a new tab to save yourself some work. On that second tab, go to the Forum and select Settings from the upper right hand side of the screen just below the banner. Then select Edit Signature.

I already had a siggie that I’m now going to replace. So I clicked on the old siggie, turning it blue, then hit the Delete key.

Then go back to the first tab, where you have your siggie selected in your gallery. Right-click on the image and select Copy image address.

Flip back to the tab where you’ve got your settings open and click on the Image icon. If you want your siggie to be centred under your forum posts, make sure you have that control selected.

Then paste the image address in the URL box as shown, then click OK.

That’s all! When you see the image of your siggie appear, you just have to click on Save Signature and you’re all done!!

Some tips for eye-catching signature files:

• Use a font or alpha with some weight to it so it stands out.
• Balance your signature: if you centre your name, have something on each side of it so it looks somewhat symmetrical.
• If you want your name at one side of the signature, have an element that leads the eye either to it or away from it.
• Don’t forget your shadows! But keep scale in mind. You don’t want your shadows to be all people notice.
• Adding CT information or other text to your siggie needs a bold font because it’s going to be very tiny when you’re done. You want people to be able to read what you’ve written.
• Your name is more than just your name, it’s a representation of who you are! So make it fabulous!!

Last thoughts: Last week I mentioned an unofficial Tutorial Tuesday Challenge. There is now a Challenge Gallery on our GS Facebook Fan Page for those who have FB accounts. For those who don’t, a link to your layout in the GingerScraps Gallery in the comments here on the Blog will get you an entry too. At the beginning of each month I’ll check both places for participants and Mr Random will select the winner. So start thinking about what we can learn together.

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!

Reverse Stencilling with Brushes

Season’s greetings all you GingerScrappers! The countdown is on… This year Hanukkah and Christmas collide, making this week probably the busiest of the year for so many of us as we prepare for the celebration of miracles and love. So I’m bringing you another quick and easy technique for jazzing up your layouts, one that won’t take more than a few minutes to try. Let’s get going.

This technique is another digital version of a paper-scrapping and crafting one similar to the inked edges technique I showed you a couple of Tuesdays ago… without the mess. Reverse stenciling is super-simple digitally – the hard part is choosing your tools! For this tutorial I’ve used a gorgeous bundle called In the Frosty Air from the brilliant Katie of Ooh La La Scraps. I’m also using a fabulous template in the Christmas Steps 1 collection from the lovely Krisztina, aka Tinci Designs. The layout is for the Scraplift Challenge, hosted this month by Ginger of Dandelion Dust Designs.

You might notice that I’ve flipped the template horizontally, because that worked better for my photo. We’re going to be working on the background layer, so I’ve turned off the visibility for all the layers BUT the background. That way I can see exactly what I’m doing. If you’re a faithful reader, you’ll remember how to do this quickly, but to review… Roll your cursor over the little eyeball icons while holding down the Left Click button and all the eyes will close.

My background paper is a very neutral grungy gray and I’m using acrylic snowflakes from In the Frost Air, which means they’re VERY hard to see in this step. So I’ve circled them for you below. Squint really hard… there they are! As you might also notice, I have all the snowflake layers selected in the Layers panel. That’s because I’m going to merge the snowflakes into a single layer.

I wanted the paint layer to be this beautiful, cool minty green, so I used the Color Picker to select a spot from the chevron paper.

The next step is to create an NEW layer just above the snowflake layer. DON’T FORGET this step!

I selected a dirty spray paint brush from my collection of free brushes. (Don’t have a spray paint brush? I got mine from Brusheezy.) If you look closely, you’ll see that pretty mint green color I selected in the Foreground Color box, that I have the brush at its maximum Size of 2500 pixels and the Opacity is 100%. By doing this part of the technique on its own layer, I can later adjust both the size of the brush and the opacity later. I can also move it around!

To keep the patches of spray paint from all looking exactly alike, I used the Brush Settings menu to change the angle of the brush. It’s also possible to adjust the roundness of the brush in this menu, but I kept it round.

Once I’d applied some paint over top of each of my 6 snowflakes, I needed to Select the snowflake shapes ON the paint layer. To do that, I made sure the paint layer was the active one in the Layers panel, then I clicked on the snowflake layer thumbnail.

That gave me those delightful little marching ants, as shown in the screenshot below.

The final step to get that amazing reverse stencil look is to delete the areas inside the marching-ant boundaries. CTRL/CMD>X and it’s done. When I played with this using a more solid snowflake png, the difference was much more obvious, but I really liked the way this looked so I kept going. That’s the whole technique, in just a few easy steps.

Now, if you have a few more minutes, I want to give you some tips on making sure the effect is as close to perfect as you can make it. I turned the visibility of my template layers back on so I could see where the spray paint actually goes – where it will be in the finished layout. It wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be – behind the cluster – so I moved the whole layer down a bit using the Move tool.

That created a little problem. Because my sprays went over the edge of the background paper at the top, I now had a pretty sharp line where the paint stopped. And that defeated the purpose! So I used the same spray brush at a much smaller size, and the Eraser tool to soften that edge.

Then I went ahead and finished my layout. You can see the subtle stenciled snowflakes quite easily now, and if you look really closely at the gallery image I’ve linked, you might be able to see that I’ve also used every one of those acrylic snowflakes again in their unaltered form.

Some of you might remember that I told you I always save a PSD form of my layouts until I’m SURE I’m not going to change anything. Look at the screenshot below and you’ll see why! I substituted a piece of ric rac for two paper strips. But in my excitement at how awesome I thought my layout was, I forgot to delete one of the dark brown paper place markers. You can see it, about halfway down on the left side. I didn’t notice it, or the fact that I’d forgotten to shadow the ric rac layers, until I’d posted to the Gallery, the Challenge thread, my Cookie Jar and to the GS Facebook page. Urk!! All was not lost… I fixed it and edited my posts so everyone would think I’m perfect. 😀

I hope you liked this lesson; I’ll be looking for your reverse stencil layouts in the gallery. One more tutorial before the year ends. What shall it be??

Merry Christmas, חג חנוכה שמח (Chag urim sameach), Happy Kwanzaa, Meán Geimhridh Sona Duit… Happiest Holidays!

Getting More Mileage from Your Templates… Easily!

I know this is a ridiculously hectic time of year for everybody. And I also know that in a few short weeks all of us will have a plethora of new photos to scrap. So this quick little tut will show you how to make a template do double duty. Templates already help to streamline the process, and any time they can be modified to accomplish more than one purpose, it’s a bonus.

I had some very sweet photos of my daughter and youngest grandson that I was dying to make into a 2-page spread for the December Buffet challenge; I wanted the layouts to look similar but not identical, and I didn’t have a lot of time. So I found a template that would work really nicely for my photos in the lovely A Year in Review – December set from Krizstina of Tinci Designs, shown below. I’d already decided that Winter Whimsies from the amazing Katie  – Just So Scrappy – would be perfect with my photos.

I knew I wanted to have the backgrounds identical to each other, in terms of papers used. So I turned off all the layers but the main paper blocks. A quick way to do that is to run your cursor over the eyeballs and up the column in the Layers panel while holding down the left mouse button. That’ll turn off every layer you run the mouse over.

If you look where the arrows are pointing you can see the eyeballs have been closed. I clipped my papers to each of the template’s main paper layers and this is what it looked like. Kinda blah, I know, but it gets better!

I’ve mentioned before that the symbols used by designers of templates aren’t RULES. They’re suggestions. You can substitute any manner of things for the flowers (for example), you can move them around if you find they’re covering up your photos in the wrong places, you can duplicate them or delete them and play with the any way you want. In a lesson down the road I’ll show you how to combine two templates into one smashingly unique layout. But back to the lesson at hand. I’ve turned on all the layers that were invisible before. This is an important step, because I want to know where all the place holders are later, when I use the copy of this layout I’m going to make in a second.

I took the steps shown below (oh, you know that’s a lie, I used keyboard shortcuts), and I saved the PSD file with the papers added in. I renamed the file so it wouldn’t overwrite the original template. I might want to use it again some day. For those of you dying to learn keyboard shortcuts, they’re actually right there in plain sight. CTRL/CMD>Shift>S is the quick way of getting to the Save As menu.

I’m going to share a little workflow tip with you now. I always make a folder for each of my layouts. Then I COPY the items I want to use into the folder so they’re all together and I can see how they’re going to look. When I’m ready to work on the layout, I open the folder and select all the items in it into PSE. Then when I’m all finished, I save the final layout in that folder both as a PSD file and a JPEG. When I’m positive I won’t need to make any changes (spelling, layers I forgot to shadow, weird little not-quite-right things I notice when I post to the gallery, you know what I mean) I can delete the rest of the things in the folder (BECAUSE THEY’RE COPIES) to save memory. That’s what I’ve shown you below.

In this step, I selected the folder I was saving to (1.) then renamed the file so I’d know which one was which (2.) and made sure it was still in PSD format so it could be changed later (3.)

Here’s my first finished layout. (The gray border is the background of my workspace in PSE, not part of the layout.)

After I saved that layout as I explained above – with the layout name instead of the working file name! – I opened up the working template again. As I said, I wanted it to match the first one, but look different. I followed the steps shown below to flip the whole template horizontally so the paper strips would line up perfectly.

Then I went ahead and moved some things around a bit, eliminated one of the photos, used a tag instead of another of the photos, enlarged the one that was left, changed some of the elements I used and ended up with this!

Here are the two layouts side-by-side, just the way they’ll be in Aaron’s birthday album of his first year in pictures.

There you go… short, sweet and to the point. Have a great week… I’ll be thinking up something new to share with you next week.

For all you former paper scrappers: INKED EDGES!

After last week, I hope there are still people willing to read my tuts. I know it was a bit of a beast, but I’m sure somebody out there is happy to give it a whirl.

Recently I was making some greeting cards and reverted to my paper-scrapping days. I LOVE inked edges on various parts of my cards and I did them on many of my paper layouts too. While I was getting dirty it occurred to me there might be a digiscrapping tutorial in there somewhere. I’ve done inked edges on some of my digi layouts and have an easy way to do them so now I’m going to share that with you. And as promised last week, this is a short snapper of a tut.

This handy tip will work on just about any paper item you can think of, with some slight variations. The trick is to work on a separate layer and on a larger-than-usual canvas. I used a template from Aprilisa’s Ready for the Weekend template pack #1 for this tutorial layout since a template makes things simple to demonstrate. So let’s get going.

I opened my template on my work space. Then I enlarged the canvas size it’s sitting on to 13×13 inches. This part is important, otherwise all you’ll have is a mess. I use a keyboard shortcut (I know, shocking, right?) for this – CTRL/CMD>Alt>C but you might like to do it the hard way. Click on the Image tab, Resize and Canvas Size. (See the keyboard shortcut there?)

This menu will pop up. Choose something larger than 12×12 inches.

Now you should have a nice transparent border all around your template.

The next step is to turn off the visibility for all the layers except the background layer, where we’re going to start. There’s a quick and easy way to do this too. Just hold down the left click button while you drag your cursor over the little eyeballs.

Of course, if you’re just inking the edges on a tag or a journal card, you can skip this step. Just make sure you have a good transparent border all around your item.

*****Before going any further, open a new blank layer just above the layer you’re working on. All you have to do is click on the icon that looks like a piece of paper with a folded corner, above the Layers panel. This is another VITAL step.*****

Next, select a brush that has a bit of scatter, but not too much. You can use a default brush that came with your software, or you can pick up some cool free ones online from places like Brusheezy.com. I like to use a spray paint brush. And we old-school paper scrappers typically use a brown ink to grunge up our stuff, so I’ve got a brown in the foreground of my Color Picker. Just below the Brush pop-up menu is the adjustment panel for your brushes. Adjust the size so your brush isn’t huge, but is big enough to make the job easy. I usually go with about 400 pixels. You see the default settings for this particular brush set in the screenshot.

Now all you have to do is paint around the edges. Have your brush cursor just off the edge of the paper and go all around the whole piece of paper. You can stop-and-go or do it all as a smooth dragging movement.

When you’ve got the whole edge inked you’re going to clip the brush layer to your paper. Right click on the brush layer in the Layers panel then choose Create Clipping Mask. Or you can do what I do, CTRL/CMD>G.

Magic! But there’s more!!

That inked edge is a tad bit dark, don’t you think? So let’s pull the opacity of that layer down to something more appealing. Like maybe about… oh… 29%. And now it’s a nice, grungy but understated inked edge.

The final step is to merge the layers. Select the background paper and brush layers, then right click and choose Merge Layers. Or… do like Jan does and go CTRL/CMD>E and you’re done.

I inked the edges of most of the papers I used for my layout for the November Buffet Challenge. I used parts of several kits: Aprilisa’s Pumpkin Everything Krafties, Connie Prince’s My Journey extra papers, Keley Designs’ Thankful for You stickers and Mandy King’s Family Tradition elements. And, of course, Aprilisa’s template.

I hope you’re enjoying your December and aren’t stressing too much about all the things you think you have to do. See you all next week!