Anchors Aweigh! (Reverse Masking)

Hey GingerScrappers! It’s raining in the Okanagan… something that hasn’t happened much around here for months. That makes today a perfect day to do some scrapping.

I want to talk a little bit about anchors though. Not the heavy iron pieces that keep ships from floating away. The kind that help bring cohesion and polish to our layouts by keeping our photos from floating away! Think for a minute about how template designers create their templates and what draws your eye to them. There are lots of factors that come into play when choosing a template, and consciously or unconsciously, anchors are usually involved. They can take many forms. Paper strips and stacks are likely the most common anchors. But paint splats, brushes, masks, scatters and ephemera can all play that supporting role. Even a grungy paper itself can provide an anchoring effect when there’s a faded area that sort of frames your photo. But what if you want something a little different? Let me show you how to create an anchor point using paper, brushes and a reverse mask. The suggestion for this topic came from Ellen [gmae], with a hat-tip to AnnieA for the example she provided in the Gallery.

In my demo, I’ll be using a semi-solid paper and a patterned paper from Aprilisa‘s (retired) Captured Romance kit. [I chose it because my layout will be showcasing a heritage wedding photo.] If you choose to use this technique, you can use whatever combo you like: solid/solid, solid/patterned, patterned/patterned or any other combination you like. I’m using a freeform method in my demo; if you choose to use a template, turn visibility to all layers but the background and your focal photo spot off so you can see what you’re doing while we work through it. My photo spot is sized to the wedding photo I’m going to use.

I stacked the semi-solid gray paper behind the photo spot and popped the patterned paper above it.

If you’re a faithful follower [thank you!!] you’ll already know I love layer masks. They’re considered a non-destructive way of removing parts of a layer; you’ll see that the colour pickers change to white and black when you add a layer mask. White reveals, black conceals. But whatever you’ve concealed is still there, lurking in the background, just in case you want it to reappear. That’s the definition of non-destructive in the Photoshop/Elements context. If you’re concealing some part of a photo or an object and you oops, all is not lost. Just click the X key to swap conceal for reveal and paint it back in! The uses for layer masks are infinite, limited only by your imagination. So to create a layer mask, click on the blue square icon with the circle in the centre, found across the top of the layers panel. You’ll see the mask appear to the right of the layer you’re masking, and it’ll have a blue box around it indicating that’s the part of the layer that is active.

Elements has a default selection of brushes already installed in the software when you download it. They’re pretty basic brushes but are useful for a lot of things. My assumption is that we’re not making a nice straight, crisp edge on our contrasting papers so for this demo I’m going to use a Wet Media Brush. The number at the bottom of the thumbnail is the default size of the brush. You can ignore that. [Yeah. I have a lot of brushes. Many of them were free.]

Resize the brush so it’s manageable but not too big. 200 pixels is a good place to start. The default brush settings are shown in the Brush Settings menu.

Before using the brush, the layer mask must be inverted. We want it to conceal everything then reveal only the parts we want to see. The mask thumbnail will be black and the paper/object being masked will be invisible. To get there, just click CTRL/CMD>I. Make sure the foreground colour in the Color Picker is white… otherwise nothing will happen!

My first version is a simple oblong heart shape. I just dragged the brush to draw out a heart! Check out the layer mask. See what happened?

Here I’ve just dragged my brush in a sort of swath, cutting off a corner of the gray paper.

Zig-zags can look pretty cool.

Or making several vertical passes frames the photo as well as anchors it.

But what if we go horizontally?

Following are a few examples of using a brush as a stamp to create an anchor. To do this, make the brush as large as you can. With this butterfly brush, I think it would look better under a smaller, squarer photo. See how the polka dots on the paper show up?

This star scatter [a challenge brush from CathyK a long time ago] would work better with a much smaller, more obvious pattern, don’t you think?

Ooh, I like the idea of this one. Not necessarily the execution though… I used three different brushes from a free set called Corners with Birds. I’d want to make sure the brushes don’t overlap because the contours are muddied.

Then there’s this filigree floral corner. I really like this one! But which version will I settle on? You’ll have to look for my layout in the Gallery to find out. I’m still on the fence!!

If you’ve seen something you’d love to emulate but aren’t sure how to get there, just shoot me a message and I’ll see what I can do to make it work for you!

PDF Version: https://bit.ly/39cdrH3

How Did They Do That? (Outlining a Title with Paper Cuts)

Are the kids all back to school now? Are you able to just sit in silence for a while? I remember how that feels! This week’s tutorial is a short snapper, not too complicated, since I don’t want to distract you from your relaxation. Sherry (spenny) messaged me a couple of weeks back, asking for some help. She’d seen some really interesting titles in the Gallery where the scrapper had lined her title up so it overlapped a series of paper/photo strips. Then she cut some of the paper strips away, leaving a background paper border visible around the alpha she used. Sherry wanted some input on how it’s done. This is what I’ve come up with. Now remember, you don’t have to follow my instructions to the letter; do what looks good to your eyes. I’m offering guidance only!

This technique can be used at any angle. Vertical, horizontal, diagonal… all the same steps. If you want a crisp look, choose a sans-serif (no extensions on the terminal strokes) alpha with some substance and clean lines. I went with a bit more of a fun alpha from the GingerBread Ladies‘ collab Happiness Is. My papers are also from this collab. Here you can see I have 8 paper strips, one for each letter in my title. I’ve resized the alpha so each letter is the same height as the paper strip. If you want to, you could double up some of the letters to a single strip for a really unique look. To make the steps easier, I’ve sandwiched the letters between the paper strip layers.

I decided how far over I wanted to move my letters so that they sit on top of the paper then I dragged out a Guideline to snug them up against. Guidelines are really useful for precision. All you need to do is ensure the Rulers are active [View>Rulers] then with your cursor inside one of them, click-hold and drag the cursor to the place where you want the Guideline. The actual Guideline won’t be this obvious. I’ve enhanced it for better visibility.

Next, I nudged the first letter over so it’s just touching my Guideline, and then I CTRL/CMD>clicked inside the LETTER‘s layer thumbnail in the Layers Panel to Select the edges of the letter. See the marching ants?

I need to make the area inside the marching ants a bit bigger. Otherwise there won’t be a border around the letter later, right? Select>Modify>Expand will make the Selection grow.

Here’s where personal preference comes into play. There’s no hard-and-fast rule for this step, and it may take some experimentation to find the right number of pixels to go with. I ended up at 15 pixels, but 20 or 25 might have worked well too.

Here you can see where the new line of marching ants, the new Selection, is.

Now, with the turquoise paper layer active, I Cut some of the paper away. Edit>Cut or CTRL/CMD>X will work for that.

I followed the same process with each of the letters in the title. Where there are little bits of paper completely disconnected from the paper strip, I used the Eraser tool and got rid of them.

Where the paper bits are still attached, like inside the C, the S and the E, I left them there.

Then I shadowed up each layer and my title is done!

The layouts Sherry showed me as examples can be seen here, here and here.

If you try this tip, let me know so I can leave you some Gallery love!!

PDF Tutorial: https://bit.ly/3kYGNyg

Faking the Wood Burning Look

Last week Ellen (gmae) sent me this message:

Hi Jan, The above YouTube is for wood burning in Photoshop. He talks through this way too quickly for me so it will take me a few stop and go’s to get the directions down pat to try in Elements but I can see it being great for rustic, western, and camping titles. Since its from Photoshop not Elements there are some things he says to do that may take some figuring. My first attempt not so wood burning looking. Has a lot to do with the styles he puts on at the end I think. Just an FYI if you look at this.

Well, you know how much I love a challenge! And this one was a doozy. As Ellen said, it’s all about the styles he puts on at the end. Because this tutorial is adapted from Photoshop AND a 7 minute video, there are 46 screenshots so I can show each step clearly. That doesn’t mean it’s hard or will take all day. I just want to be sure even the most inexperienced user can follow along.

I’ll be demonstrating using a word art file from Word Art World‘s Jen Arbon. The woodgrain paper is from the GingerBread Ladies‘ Cabin Fever collab kit. If you’d like to use your own text or image, the technique will be exactly the same. [Simplify your text layer though!]

To start off, I made a Copy of the word art layer. You can right-click on the layer and choose Duplicate Layer then click OK on the pop-up, or you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD>J. [It’s been awhile since I explained the keyboard shortcuts. These are simple keystrokes that take the place of several steps using the other methods of achieving something. I use Windows, which has a CTRL key. On a Mac, it would be a CMD key. Windows uses ALT and Mac uses OPT. So when I show you a keyboard shortcut I’ll give you both Windows and Mac keys.]

Next I created a new blank layer BETWEEN the two word art layers by holding down the CTRL/CMD key and clicking on the New Layer icon [looks like a sheet of paper with a corner dog-eared] from the top left of the Layers panel. The CTRL/CMD key tells Elements to put it UNDER the active layer.

With the blank layer active, I made the layer solid white: Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Color

Since I’m filling the whole layer with white the box for Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask can be unticked.

There are a couple of ways to choose a colour from the Color Picker: click on an area of a photo/paper/element with the Eyedropper tool, click on a spot inside the colour swatch or type in the colour number. Pure white is “ffffff“.

Then I Merged the white layer with the word art Copy layer: SHIFT>click on the two layers then right-click and choose Merge Layers or even simpler, CTRL/CMD>E.

Now I have three layers, with the wood paper on the bottom of the stack and the black-and-white word art layer on top as shown. I want to Select just the word art on the black-and-white layer so I CTRL/CMD>clicked on the layer thumbnail [the little image on the left of the layer in the panel] of the word art with the black-and-white layer active. See the marching ants?

I want to Modify the Selection. I clicked Select>Modify>Expand as shown.

I only want it to Expand by 1 pixel.

To fill that hairline space with black [in the foreground colour box] I clicked ALT/OPT>D and Elements did the work.

Next I Inverted the colours so the word art is white on black by just clicking CTRL/CMD>I. This tutorial has a bunch of things I’ve never tried before. This is the first one. Filter>Stylize>Wind.

This menu opens up. Make sure the Method is Wind. The Direction doesn’t matter at this point. You can see in the Preview pane what the Filter will do.

This Filter will be applied two more times. Elements will remember the last Filter used, so you can click Filter and Wind will be right at the top. Or, even easier, just click CTRL/CMD>F. Just make sure it’s applied three times in total.

This is what it’s supposed to look like. Don’t be alarmed!!

Now I’m going to do the Filter step again. Because I’m going to make a change to the settings I can’t just CTRL/CMD>F my way there.

This time the Direction has to be changed so the streaks go the opposite way.

Here’s after the first hit with the Wind Filter. The change isn’t very obvious.

So I hit it again two more times! CTRL/CMD>F and CTRL/CMD>F.

Wow! But don’t worry, that’s what it should look like!

And then I Inverted the colours again so the word art was once again black-on-white. CTRL/CMD>I.

I’m not done with Filters yet. This time I’m going to add a Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur to the mix.

But not too much of a Blur… just a Radius of 1 pixel.

The black is a bit harsh, so I clicked Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Levels. Keyboard shortcut: CTRL/CMD>L.

And I changed the Output Level from 0 to 72. That grays the black a bit, but not too much.

Remember Blend Modes? They’re such a great tool!! I changed the Blend Mode to Color Burn by clicking on that bar above the Layers panel that usually says Normal and choosing Color Burn from the dropdown list.

Now the sugars in the wood look like they’ve been caramelized!

It’s a little TOO obvious, so I dropped the Opacity of the layer to 60%.

Once again I Selected the edges of the word art by CTRL/CMD>clicking on the word art layer thumbnail with the altered word art layer active. Then I did something else I’ve never tried before… Select>Feather to soften the edges of the caramelized areas just a teensy bit.

I gave it a Feather Radius of 2 pixels. Everything about this needs a light touch.

With the edges still Selected, I added a new Fill Layer. Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Color. This new Fill Layer will be the base for the next few steps.

Again, I didn’t need to tick the Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask, because only the Selected areas will be filled. On this settings menu, I dropped the Opacity of the Fill to 40%.

The Color Picker opened, and I wanted pure black. The code number for black is 000000.

After I created the Fill Layer, I Simplified it so the mask went away. Right-click on the layer and choose Simplify Layer.

Next I made 2 Copies of this black Fill Layer and turned Visibility for the top two Copy Layers off. I wanted to see what was happening to each active layer, starting with the original Fill Layer. [In Photoshop the next several steps can all be accomplished on the same layer, but Elements isn’t that skillful. Each step needs its own layer. *Where have you heard that before?*]

To the bottom Fill Layer, I added a Bevel Style. Click on the Styles button at the bottom of the Layers panel then choose Bevels. From the dropdown menu choose Simple Outer as shown. [If you hover the cursor over the thumbnails in the dropdown, a description box opens so you know what’s what.]

Each of the Styles has a default setting, but you can easily change the settings by double-clicking on the fx icon on the far right of the layer. The settings menu opens. Here I changed the Lighting Angle to 130°, the Drop Shadow settings to Size 29 pixels, Distance 13 pixels, and Opacity 22%, then the Bevel settings to 20 pixels and the Direction to Down.

Next I activated the first Copy Layer just above the layer I last worked on, but this time I chose Styles>Inner Shadows.

I double-clicked the fx icon and from the settings I made the Lighting Angle 147°, Size 50 pixels, Distance 4 pixels and Opacity 20%.

Then I changed the Blend Mode for this layer to Linear Burn.

It’s looking pretty good!

I wanted just a bit more depth to the image so I activated the top Copy Layer and from the Styles menu I chose Outer Glows.

I used Simple from the menu as shown.

After double-clicking on the fx icon, I adjusted the settings: Lighting Angle 130°, Size 21 pixels and Opacity 25%.

The Outer Glow layer looked odd on top so I moved it to the bottom of the Copy Layer stack and lowered the Opacity to 10%. This took a bit of experimentation based on what I wanted to see.

Last but not least, I turned the original word art layer’s visibility back on. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.

Some comments: The way this technique looks in the end will depend on several factors. If you use a smooth wood paper, your burned area will be smooth too. If you use a darker or lighter wood paper, you may need to fiddle with Opacity to get the looks you want. Obviously, doing this to a darker wood will result in darker burned areas, and it may be hard to see. On a lighter coloured wood, it may look too black, and again, you’d need to make some tweaks. I scrapped my work (and about 100 screenshots) 4 times before I was comfortable with this enough to show it to you. Don’t be afraid to make some of your own decisions! If you’re not happy with it, make some changes!!

PDF Version: https://bit.ly/3zAdEQ4