Happy Friday!!! I hope you remember out little teaser from Tuesday’s Buffet newsletter. Are you ready to party? 🥳🎂🎉 Let’s see what kind of fun we’re going to have for the next week!
Remember when you spend $10 or more in the store you will also get this fun fall kit.
Let’s see what the designers are releasing this week.
When you complete ten challenges in the forum, you get this wonderful full kit!!
Are you excited about all the fun?
Another Guided Edit – Multi-Photo Text
September first.. ALREADY?!! That got me thinking about other firsts. Like first birthdays and first days of school. My oldest grandson started first grade about 10 days ago and it seems like it was only a few days ago that he was sleeping in his stroller while his parents and I toured the botanical garden. Time flies too quickly but we scrapbookers know we can hold onto those memories. This Guided Edit I want to show you today can be adapted so many ways. Sadly it didn’t appear until Elements 2019, but it’s possible to create the same effect in previous versions, it’s just a lot more work.
Drop a photo or a paper into your Photo Bin then click Guided Edits>Fun Edits>Multi Photo Text. If you don’t have a photo or paper in your Photo Bin, Elements will prompt you.
For my example, I’m using a series of photos from Pixabay; the photographer is Tim Kraaijvanger. This photo of a birthday cake is a great background photo. For a back-to-school version, you could have a photo of the school bus with the door open or driving away, your kiddo walking into the school or maybe the school itself. Along the right side of the screenshot you can see the menu for the Edit.
When I clicked on the Text Tool bar, the background photo became very translucent. The Text Tool bar takes you to your font library. The default font is Impact, but you can choose any font that will give you a suitable spot to attach photos.
I chose to use KG All of the Stars for this one. It’ll work well. The foreground colour doesn’t matter because Elements will turn your text into clipping masks.
You have total control over the size and placement of your text, but the software developers kindly included two automated options. You can automatically centre it horizontally across your background, as shown, by clicking the optional Fit button.
Or you can click the Fill button and have it fill the entire space.
But I want mine to be in the upper right area of my background where the banner is. So I moved it there and sized it accordingly. Then I clicked on the Create Frames button and the text disappeared, sort of.
I dragged and dropped my photos onto the canvas from my Photo Bin. Those thoughtful software developers included an option to pull a photo from the Photo Bin, or to grab it from a folder on my computer. I clicked on the spaces one at a time to make them active and added my photos.
The photos can be manipulated, resized, repositioned or rotated as needed to obtain the best look. I wanted to be able to see her face and her cake in all of them and I wanted to be sure the photos filled the frames. That middle one needed a bit of rotation.
Moving down the menu, there’s an optional step to change the background. This can be useful. Having a transparent background would let me move just that photo-filled text onto my layout.
Or I could pull a colour from one of the photos and use that as the background by clicking on the Color button and using the Color Picker.
Solid white might work for you.
Or solid black.
Another optional step is to add a bevel and drop shadow to the text. This sample shows the Small setting.
The Medium setting looks like this. I think it takes away from the photos, so I’d not be using this one!
Or this one! Large is just too, too, too!
I went back to the Small setting. Then I clicked on Next.
A new menu opened up that allows me to Save my work, or go on to Edit some more, Share or be Done.
When the Expert Editor opens you can see all the layers Elements created while I was working through the Guided Edit. Some of the layers are Locked, and can’t be altered. Some are invisible and others are completely editable. It gives us a peek into how the Edit works.
I wanted more of the background photo to be visible so I adjusted the Opacity of the adjustment mask (the active layer with the mask outlined) to 75%.
Then I added some more text for context and it’s ready to Save, or to use as part of a layout. If I’d used a transparent background, I could put that text into a layout anywhere. I could crop that background photo to a square and have an image I could turn into my entire 12×12 layout, and then add some embellies to it for fun. So many options!
What would you like me to show you next week?
Welcome to the first of the “ber” months. As far as I’m concerned, this means fall is about on the doorstep (for the northern hemisphere anyway). I love fall. What is your favorite season?
Don’t forget to check out the Buffet Bundles. One easy click to add bundles of Buffet goodies to your cart.
Let’s see some of the fabulous new kits in the September Buffet. You’ll see how the store CT used some of these below.
With any $10 purchase you get this awesome fall themed kit for free.
The Monthly Mix for this month is also fall themed. I love all the fall colors (have I mentioned that I <3 Fall?)
New month means new Daily Download. This month it’s hosted by ADB Designs and Karen Schulz. I have a feeling this one is going to be very popular.
I love the theme for this month’s challenge reward. It’s such an important thought right now. Just complete 10 challenges and this beauty is your reward.
And finally, how about a glance at what the talented store creative team did with the Buffet kits. Head over to the gallery to see more.
And a little teaser. Make sure you visit the forum this weekend (starting Friday). There is a big celebration happening.
Happy Friday scrappy friends! Can you believe it’s the last Friday in August? Have your kids started back to school? Are they going in person, virtual, or a combination. Maybe you homeschool? I would love to hear where you are located and what your schools are doing. My husband and I have decided we are very glad we don’t have school-aged children any longer. We have plenty of friends that do, however, and I know they are struggling.
Remember, if you spend $10 or more in the store you get this great kit for free.
Now let’s see what is new in the store for this week.
Have you grabbed the Monthly Mix kit for this month?
Just a few more days to get this kit as a reward for completing any 10 challenges in the forum.
Buckle up and get ready for September. The first week is big with the usual buffet releases and some FUN forum-wide things.
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.
Goodness scrappers. There is so much goodness going on in the store this week. And we’re going to just jump in with the big one!
This sale will end promptly at 11:59pm (Eastern Time) on August 27, 2020.
Please remember to download these items asap!
These are retiring products, after 45 days they will be removed from the server and no longer available to download.
And – any $10 spend in the store gets you this fun Free With Purchase kit.
Let’s see a sampling of this week’s new goodies.
You have a little over a week to get your challenges done and logged for August. Remember, you get this awesome kit as a reward for completing 10 challenges.
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So, schools are starting back up. So, we’re just going to celebrate that, not focus on the other issues.
Scrappin’ Serenity is definitely celebrating back to school!
[Read more…]
Recorded History
When I woke up this morning I was shocked to realize that it’s Tuesday already! There has been some momentous happenings in our house since I last blogged here. We found out on Thursday that my husband has a half-sister! He was raised as an only – his father left them when he was a toddler. So when this very sweet lady contacted our daughter via 23andMe to find out how they were related, it was the LAST thing that occurred to any of us. He’s very excited, which surprised me a little. We’re still trying to track down confirmation, but the odds are very high that she IS his half-sister. And that’s what has consumed me for the last few days. So today’s tutorial is a bit of a lazy one – I’m going to show you some great (FREE) fonts for heritage layouts, since genealogy is at the forefront of my mind right now. I found all of these at my favourite source for free fonts, dafont.com.
I looked for title fonts, monogram fonts and journaling fonts. We’ll start with titles, but they’re not really in any kind of order.
Black Chancery is a Gothic font that is easy to read and not overly fancy.
Blacklet is another Gothic font, a bit more like those old stencils we used in school.
I like Darks Skyrim Font for its drama! It has a vintage look to it, but also suggests intrigue and strength.
Beyond Wonderland has a whimsical but old-tyme-y look.
Then there’s Valdemar. This one is a bit Teutonic, so if you have Germanic ancestry it would fit very well.
1742 Frenchcivilite makes me think of pirates and swashbuckling. It looks like it was written with a quill pen.
Linthicum reminds me of early America. I don’t have any ancestors who arrived in North America before about 1830, but my husband has them dating back to 1608!
Hentimps Circlet is another crisp Gothic font with just the right amount of curlicue.
Arquitec is another very antique-looking one. I can’t remember if I downloaded it, but I want it in my collection! [There! Fixed it!]
Any J. R. R.Tolkien or George R. R. Martin descendants out there? EG Dragon Caps was made for you!
I saw Silvus and swooned! The fairytale quality is so attractive! I think it could be great for either titles or monograms and I’m already planning to dissect it so I can turn it into illuminated initials.
Christensen Caps is another one that could be amazingly illuminated. It looks like something you’d find on a medieval manuscript.
I like American Dreamer for its simplicity.
Riesling is one of my favourites. It’s got a real Art-Deco vibe to it and makes me think of the Great Gatsby.
I like Royal Queen, a curvy Gothic font. It could be a title font, or used for journaling because it’s readily legible.
Royal Initialen is one I’ve had in my collection for years. It’s purely a monogram font and it has so many possibilities for someone who likes to experiment. <raises hand>
What a great serif style title font! Cash Currency is bold, solid and elegant.
When I first saw Victorian Parlor, the first thing that popped into my head was the Addams Family! I like the curly-swirly caps paired with the more simple lower case letters.
The Parthenon isn’t just a Greek monument! I feel like this could work for both titles and monograms.
Here’s another versatile one, Queensby. I’d probably use it for subtitles and journaling.
Journaling fonts should be ones that don’t eat space and are easy to read. I like to use typewriter-style fonts for documenting family history, and the more rustic the font, the better I like it. Old Newspaper Types is one I’ve used a few times, and when I finally get around to scrapping the story of my Luddite ancestor, who I learned about via a newspaper story, this is what I’m going to use.
Rough Typewriter is another of my go-to typewritten fonts. It’s just messy enough to look old, but not too messy to read.
Lucky Typewriter is just a bit more detailed.
CF Remington Typewriter has that antique look to it that I like so much.
Tippa reminds me of mimeographed tests I had back in elementary school. It has that distressed look.
Kimberly Geswein has a ton of fabulous handwritten fonts that are perfect for journaling and I think KG Makes You Stronger is about perfect.
Handwriting CR is clean, clear and great for those back-to-school layouts too.
I like Lie to Me a lot. It’s legible but a little more adult than some of the handwritten fonts.
If you want a little more oomph in your handwritten font, A Casual Handwritten Pen brings it. It’s a bit bolder, but still clean and clear.
And last, Better Together Condensed is a clean, clear and slightly different handwritten font. It’ll allow you to cram a lot of text into a small space.
I know that as scrapbookers our main goal is to preserve our stories. Sure, creating a beautiful layout is a wonderful pursuit, but it’s the story behind the creation that really matters. I hope you’ve seen some new fonts that might work for your historical records!
Woohoo….we’ve made it to another Friday. Did you all come through relatively unscathed? I know different places had some wicked weather this week. We had an earthquake where I am and I didn’t even feel it.
As always, a $10 purchase in the GingerScraps store gets you this fun {dog days of summer} kit.
Let’s see what our designers have new for the middle of August.
Have you picked up the Monthly Mix yet? What a fun GingerBread Ladies collab.
And you still have a couple of weeks left to get your challenges logged for August and get this gorgeous kit as the reward. It only takes 10 completed challenges to qualify.
Make sure to check in the store tomorrow for the beginning of the August Bake Sale!!
Peek-a-Boo, I See You (Solving Underexposed Faces)
Well, it seems photo editing has become the hot topic for Tutorial Tuesday! After last week’s technique for diminishing shiny skin, Steph sent me a message: “I love this week’s blog post about correcting a shiny face. Do you remember if you have a tutorial about improving a photo that has a face in shadows? I tried searching but didn’t see one. Thanks, Steph“. I don’t think I have done one specific to faces, although we’ve talked about fixing underexposed photos in a couple of ways, by editing in Camera Raw or by copying the photo and changing the Blend Mode to Screen, then copying that new layer as many times as necessary to bring out those details. But there will be times when those methods aren’t going to work. Like when your subject is backlit…
This gentleman is Mike. He works for JuJu Tours in Negril, Jamaica as a glass-bottom boat pilot. We took a New Year’s Eve boat tour with him in 2014 and I have quite a few photos where I know who I’m looking at but nobody else will. It seemed like a good choice for this tutorial.
I like to do most of my experimentation on a copy layer so that my original is still there if I need to refer to it. So my first step is always to make a Copy layer. CTRL/CMD>J is the keyboard shortcut, but if you’re into working more than necessary, right-click on the background layer then choose Duplicate Layer and follow the prompts.
I want to separate Mike from the sky and now that I’ve figured out how amazing the Polygonal Lasso tool is, that’s what I used here. The trick to making this tool work beautifully for you is to make small movements with your mouse and click frequently to mark your spot.
On the screenshot, I’ve used the word “slowly”. But it only took me about 3 minutes of small mouse movements and clicks to get a relatively clean selection. When I got back to my starting point the tool automatically turned on the marching ants showing me where my selection was.
One drawback to the Polygonal Lasso tool is that you can’t Zoom in and out while you’re using it, so it’s hard to get a perfect selection. So once I have my basic shape lassoed, I use the Selection Brush tool – its icon looks just like a paintbrush with a few marching ants curving above the bristles. This tool lets me add or subtract areas of my selection. I usually use the biggest brush I can for the area I’m adjusting, and I toggle back and forth between adding and subtracting until I get all of my marching ants following the edge of my selection. The controls for this tool are at the bottom left of the workspace.
I Zoom in on areas like this one so I can see as clearly as possible where my ants have strayed.
This photo was a great one for this example, because there aren’t a lot of these sticky spots. Don’t be put off by the time it takes to do this – it’s actually not that bad… maybe another 2 minutes.
The spot where the sunglasses’ temple attaches needed some attention.
For general purposes, perfection is impossible and a waste of time. And in the end, it’s not usually necessary because unless the imperfection is a big one, it’s not going to be the centre of attention, so don’t sweat it!
Depending on your background though, a spot like this might deserve some precision. The sky here is really blown out and I’m not going to change that, but if I had some sort of detail – leaves on a tree for example – that would be visible in that gap, I’d definitely want to add it into my selection.
After I ‘d gone all the way around the selection and adjusted as needed, I Zoomed back out a bit to see how clean the edge looked. On to the next step!
I wanted to separate Mike from the sky – or more accurately I wanted to remove the sky from around Mike. To make that happen, I Inverted the selection: Select>Inverse or CTRL/CMD>SHIFT>I.
With the Copy layer still the active one, I Cut away the sky. Edit>Cut or CTRL/CMD>X
This screenshot is just to show you that the sky is now gone from that top layer, but it’s still present in the original layer (it’s just invisible right now).
Now that Mike was all by himself on the top layer, I used Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Shadows/Highlights. The default setting for this adjustment is for the Shadows to be automatically decreased by 50% so don’t be shocked! Highlights are default-set at 0% and Contrast is set right in the centre.
I pushed the Lighten Shadows slider all the way over to 100% to really lighten up his face. I Darkened Highlights by 26% and Midtone Contrast was boosted to +28%. All of a sudden it’s almost possible to identify what’s reflected in his lenses.
I’m happy I can see Mike‘s features now, but I think the image is a bit too soft. My favourite tool for fixing that is the Haze Removal menu.
Haze Removal also darkens the image a wee touch, as you can see in the preview below. But it looks good with the default setting so I went ahead and clicked OK.
For all intents and purposes, I could quit right here and it would be perfectly fine. But I’m always going to take it a bit further so I can show you what else you can do with your photos. I think the background is a lot blown out and that’s fixable.
But before we move on to that, I decided Mike still looked a bit shadowy. So I decided to Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Brightness/Contrast just a smidge.
These sliders start out in the centre. I pushed the Brightness slider to 54 and the Contrast slider to 10. Now it’s good.
Just for fun, I turned off the top layer to remind myself where I started.
Okay, on to the sky. I made another Copy layer (right-click>Duplicate Layer or CTRL/CMD>J) of the background (bottom) layer.
With the Copy layer active, all I did was change the Blend Mode to Color Burn. It looks a bit neonish now though.
Quick fix: Decrease the Opacity of the Color Burn layer to 61%.
Then I brought Mike back and Merged all the layers so I could save my work.
I wasn’t totally happy with the finished image though. Mike still looked a bit fuzzy. So I Copied that image layer again so I could add a High Pass Filter.
Here’s why you do the High Pass filter on its own layer. A rule of thumb for sharpening an image this way is that you should only see a hint of colour through the filter. Otherwise you risk having it look over-processed. (I have plans for a really interesting tutorial where you WANT to have an in-your-face look to your photo, but that’s all I’m telling you.)
To see how the filter works, change the Blend Mode to Overlay.
And now you see the photo I THOUGHT I took! I just had to Merge the layers again and save it for later.
Before I go, I want to remind you that you’re in control of your work. You can stop at any point along the way if you’re happy with what you’re seeing. These tutorials are intended to help you understand your software, make it work harder for you without making you work harder to get what you want, and to up your scrapbooking game… while having a little fun along the way.
