Text Talk – LETTERPRESS!

Hey, all you Gingerscrappers! It’s Tuesday again and time for another little lesson to take your layouts up a notch. Glee posted a comment on one of my layouts in the gallery and she mentioned that my text looked like letterpress. She’s got a great eye… it’s the digital equivalent and it’s super-simple to do. I knew I was going to need a quick topic for this week because of the hectic, crazy schedule I’ve had at my real job and her comment just fit the bill perfectly. So let me show you how to turn text into letterpress.

For those who aren’t sure what that means, it’s how print looks when it’s typed with an old-fashioned manual typewriter on soft paper. It’s indented and the edges appear quite crisp. Maybe you’re wondering why you’d want to create this effect. Well, it makes your journaling more visible. It has some shadowing and texture, it adds depth and detail to your text and catches attention. It’s something people who were paper scrappers will love to see in the gallery. And perhaps most importantly, it GROUNDS your text. Text should never “float”… it can’t float when we paper scrap, and it must not when we do it digitally. For this reason, your text layers should be on the layer immediately above the paper or tag or label or whatever you’re applying it to, otherwise it’s going to look odd. And we don’t want that!

I like to use this technique on typewriter fonts like Typical Typewriter (used in the example), F25 Executive, Underwood 5 and similar fonts. But it also looks great with handwriting fonts, especially if you use an inky blue – it looks like you’ve scribbled it down with a ball-point pen. I know you’re going to try this!

Once you’ve typed out what you want to transform, you’re going to click on the Styles tab and select Bevels.

As you roll your mouse over the little thumbnails a label with the type of effect the style will create will pop up. You want to select Simple Emboss.

This is what it looks like. Downright horrible!! This is where the magic happens…

Double-click on the fx icon on your text layer. This box will open up. You want to grab the slider for Size and drag it to the left.

The default is 21 pixels. I like to go down to about 5 or 6. But you can go all the way to 0 and it will still alter your text visibly.

Then click on the box next to Down and look! It’s now “debossed” and looks dramatically different. That’s all there is to it!

I wanted to have the labels on all three of the tabs on my layout looking alike, so once I had my text typed onto the appropriate layers, I right-clicked on the layer where I’d already “pressed” the text and selected Copy Layer Style as shown.

Then I selected my new text layers and right-clicked on them. Then I selected Paste Layer Style and all my tabs looked alike.

This handy technique literally takes only seconds once you’ve done it a few times. What are YOU going to use it for?

The layout I’ve screenshotted for this tut was created with the Daily Download kit Just Be from Laurie’s Scraps and Designs. There are links posted here on the blog every day that let you pick up the pieces of the kit. If you’ve missed the first half of the month, the full kit will be available for sale in December. It’s got a wonderful colour palette and I enjoyed playing with it. Laurie is in the Designer Spotlight this month and is hosting the Designer Spotlight Challenge. Check it out!

Til next week, GSers!

Shadow Basics

Gingerscrapper Marie Williams responded to my request for topics with an interest in learning more about shadows, particularly with clusters. Shadowing is a very complex topic so we’re going to look at some basics today.

When we scrap our memories with digital supplies everything is completely flat, two-dimensional… and it looks funny. Using drop shadows makes everything more realistic and attractive. Let’s talk about shadows a little bit before we look at how to make them look good. The first thing we should talk about is light and the source of the light. There are usually multiple light sources shining on an object, and there may be shadows in several directions but unless the light is directly above and perpendicular to an object, there will be one dominant light source/shadow combo. In Photoshop Elements, the default angle of light for the drop shadow styles bundled in the software is 120° – coming from the upper left corner – but that can be changed to suit your purposes. The default colour of the integrated drop shadows is solid black… and about as UNnatural as you can get. But that too can be changed to suit your purposes. Many digiscrappers like to use a dark brown shadow for their layouts, which makes a natural-looking shadow and a pleasing outcome. So let’s play with the shadows that come with the software and see how to manipulate them.

Flat and uninspiring. That’s how these beads from Ooh La La Scraps’ Creepy kit look against one of the papers from the same kit.

When thinking about shadows, you not only have to consider where the light is coming from but also how much light will pass UNDER an object and how far the shadow will spread. Anything that touches the surface it’s sitting on will cast a sharper, darker shadow than something that floats over it. The more contact an object makes with the surface under it, the darker the shadow will be. So hard objects like beads, buttons, frames, metal pieces like paper clips and brads need a more substantial shadow than a flower or a butterfly. Also, the thinner an object – like paper for example, the narrower and sharper the shadow.

The Drop Shadow menu is found under the Styles tab in the Effects panel. Shown below is the meager selection of shadow choices. For the beads in the screenshot, I selected the “Low” shadow style and double-clicked on it to shadow my beads. (If you’re someone who likes to take extra time at a task, you can right click on the style swatch and then select Apply to Document.)

The resulting shadow was quite sharp and harsh, so I double-clicked on the little fx on the Layers panel, which opened up this menu. I pulled the sliders until I liked the way the shadow looked. In another set of screenshots I’ll show you the difference between the stock shadow and one that’s been tweaked. Notice that there’s an indicator for the Lighting Angle. The labels for the sliders are a little confusing, so I’m going to explain how they work. The Size slider will alter the sharpness of the edge on your shadow. The Distance slider controls the width of the shadow and the Opacity slider is pretty self-explanatory. Having said that, remember you’re going for natural and appealing so you’ll probably want to decrease the opacity from the default setting of 75%; how much will depend on what you’re shadowing. There’s also a black box there that, when you click on it, opens up the colour picker. More about that later.

Flowers are much more complex than beads so let’s do one of them now. The style that is highlighted in the screenshot is the same one I used for the beads, but the one with the label Soft Edge is the one I used. Remember what I said about the amount of light that can pass UNDER an object. Flower petals allow a lot more light under them than beads do, so the shadow will be softer and wider.

Below is the way the shadow looks without any adjustments. It looks okay, but I think it can look better. What do you think?

It’s bigger, it’s farther away and it’s not as dark here, but it looks much more natural.

Brads aren’t a lot different from beads and buttons, but they usually have very sharp edges, so their shadows need to be a bit sharper. They’re also hard and dense, so they need a darker shadow.

The unadjusted shadow, using the Hard Edge style which should be appropriate for a hard, sharp object like this, is pretty harsh. See where the sliders are? Size is at 0, Distance at 20 and Opacity at 75%. And it’s kinda ugly.

So I pulled the sliders a bit, Size to 18, left the Distance at 20 and decreased Opacity to 65%. But I also thought I’d play with the colour of the shadow a little. So I looked at the gray paper in the background and selected a paler greenish-gray for the shadow.

The change shows up below. See how the shadow is a little softer and looks so much better? The difference in colour of the shadow is very subtle and isn’t really visible in the screenshot. But this is an important step to know, because if your background paper is already black, how are your shadows going to show up? Simple… change the shadow colour.

Buttons are very similar to brads, in the sense that they’re hard and most of the back is in contact with the paper. But this one has a slight curve at the edge, so there will be a bit more light getting under there. Unadjusted Hard Edge shadow shown below.

Size is now 32, Distance is still 20 and Opacity is 63%. Notice anything else? YES!! I changed the Lighting Angle to 60°. Good eye! (That’s the main secret here… watch what happens to your shadows as you move the sliders and when it looks right, you’ll know it.)

Okay, let’s talk about string, twine, curly ribbon, yarn, wire… those things that are skinny and flexible. Their shadows will be a little different. Because there’s not going to be a lot of it that is in direct contact with the background, their shadows are going to need to be a bit further away and a lot softer. I selected the Soft Edge style, which looks okay, but it can be a lot better. (Where have I heard that before?)

I thought the shadow was a little TOO soft, so I pulled the Size slider to the left a touch – to 32 from 42, the Distance slider to the right a touch to 42 from 20 and the Opacity slider to the left to 46% from the default 75%. Better!

Let’s go back to flowers again for a second. Some flowers are much denser than others. This one has several more layers of petals than the first one I showed you, so it’s going to cast a more substantial shadow. It’s also flatter, so there will be less light getting under it and the shadow won’t be as spready.

I decreased the Size a bit, increased the Distance a bit and decreased the Opacity a bit.

Stitches are really tricky! Depending on what kind of thread used they can be fine or hefty, narrow or thick. The also are close to the surface they’re applied to, so the shadow will be… narrow, fairly sharp and fairly dark. I selected the Soft Edge style.

Um… no. Let’s tweak a bit.

You can see what adjustments I made. And how much better it looks!

I know you’re all wondering, “But you haven’t said anything about paper, except in passing”. So think about paper. It’s thin – but can be thicker (cardstock). It usually is quite close to the surface it’s sitting on. (Lifting paper corners digitally is a lesson for another day.) And it has a sharp edge. (Paper cuts anyone?) I used the Low style since it is paper I’m shadowing and it is close to the paper under it. I wanted to show you a dialog box you’ll sometimes see if you use these integrated shadows on something narrow (like the stitches) so I’m showing you a paper border.

You can ignore that! Click on OK and carry on. Your shadow will still show up just fine. You can leave it as is, or tweak it a bit so the shadow is a little tighter. Defaults are 20, 20 and 75%.

And then we should look at stickers. My very first tutorial for GS taught you how to make stickers with fonts, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t show you how to get a realistic shadow on your stickers. Stickers sit VERY close to the background they’re attached to. There will be a shadow, but it will be narrow, sharp and not particularly dark because of the thinness of the paper they’re on. I went with the Hard Edge style.

Then I shrunk it down to a teeny, tiny skinny shadow. Because stickers don’t float!

Now let’s put it all together and make a cluster. Start dropping your shadows on the items closest to the paper and work your way up, thinking about how much of the object is touching your layout, the object’s density, where the light is coming from and what’s underneath it.

I decided the tag is made of cardstock, so it’s got a bit heavier shadow than plain paper.

The leaves are touching but curved, so they get a bigger, softer shadow.

The white flower is flat and stiff, but is on top of the leaves, so it gets a slightly sharp but also slightly wider shadow. The yellow flower is a bit fluffier and is on top of the other three items so it needs a more diffuse shadow. Notice the colour of the shadows cast by the top-most layer of petals… they’re not black but a dark orange. Try and picture those in black. Ugh!

And finally, the string bow is on top of everything, and is thin and floppy. So it needs a shadow that’s farther away but still visible. (A lesson on warping shadows for things like this bow is on my list for a tutorial down the road.) And there we are! A cluster with natural-looking drop shadows.

WHEW! That was a long-winded lesson!! I hope you’re still following along. After all that, I’ll tell you a secret. I use a set of shadow styles I bought from a designer. Because I’m into instant gratification… and I’m lazy! It’s just so much easier and quicker to use a preset – double-click and you’re done. But there are times when I still play with those presets because I want a different look. The layout I created with the items in this tut is in the gallery. See if you can pick out where I’ve tweaked things. There are a few, but they’re not obvious… Then go practice, practice, practice! Your eye will get better and better and soon your shadows will be the envy of the digi-world.

(PS… GS doesn’t have a designer who has shadow presets in her store. But I know where you can find them…)

Playing with Text

How did it get to be November already? There are only 61 days left in this year. Doesn’t that sound depressing? Let’s get some distraction going and learn how to text on a path. GingerScrapper Janytime mentioned she’d like to know how it’s done, and I had to confess I didn’t know. So I set out to learn, and now I’m going to teach you! This month’s Font Challenge, hosted by the lovely Rachel Pearce, also known as Seatrout Scraps, is to use the free font Motion Picture. I just happened to have it in my font library, but in case you don’t have it and haven’t peeked in the Forum yet, you can grab it here.

As I’ve mentioned before, I like to do things like titles on their own workspace so I can see better what I’m doing. And as I’ve also mentioned before, you know what works best for you and your workflow, so my instructions are guidelines. Here’s the quote I plan to use for my Font Challenge layout.

There are several ways you can manipulate your text in Photoshop Elements. Today we’re going to look at three of them. The first is Text on Selection. When you click on the Text Tool this menu opens up. The grayed icon is the one to click on to type on the outline of a selection. For the demo I’m only showing you how it works with an ellipse, but it also works for rectangular, circular and complex selections as well. I’ll show you at the end of the tutorial how to create a complex selection for those who are interested.

After I chose the Text Tool, my font, colour, size and the Text on Selection icon, I then clicked on the elliptical Marquee Tool (the icon with the dotted outline). I clicked and dragged an ellipse shape on my workspace. When I had the size and shape I liked, I moved it by holding down the CTRL/CMD key and dragging it to the centre. Then I clicked in the middle of the space created by the marching ants. It asked me to Commit current operation so I clicked on the green check mark.

The software made a narrow line around the selection I made, as shown below. I zoomed in tight (CTRL/CMD++) so I could see what was happening. To begin typing my text around this outline, I moved my cursor onto that thin line until I could see the “I-beam” symbol that indicates the starting point for text and clicked it. I had hoped the screenshot would show you it, but I’m not seeing it there. Sorry!

I started typing my quote and it looked like this. When I was at the end of the quote, I was asked to Commit current operation again. I wanted the type to cover more of the outline so I clicked the green check mark and then…

I double-clicked on the text… because it’s just as editable as any other text. I adjusted the size of the type until I was happy with it and clicked on the green check mark.

The end result is shown below. And I know what you’re thinking… “But I don’t WANT that line there!” And it’s easy to make it disappear.

Simplify the layer!

Et voilà! The line, or path, is gone and my text is a partial ellipse. Easy peasy!!

Now let’s look at Text on Shape. It’s actually a little more limited than Text on Selection because you’re restricted to the shapes shown: rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, hexagon, heart, speech bubble and butterfly. I tried it with the butterfly and decided it was too finicky. But the heart… that was a great one to play with!

As with the ellipse, I clicked and dragged out a nice sized heart. Once I had it the size I wanted, I again clicked insode the shape to Commit to current operation and create the path. It took me a minute to realize that I had to start my text on the curve of the left side. I typed out my quote twice but it still didn’t reach back to the beginning.

So again, I double clicked on the text and increased the size of the font until it did. I had to add some spaces to keep the letters from running into each other in some spots, but in the end it looked great!

Then I simplified the layer and the path went poof. (Notice that the T that was in the Layers Panel for my text layer is now just a regular old layer. I can’t make any further adjustments to my typing now without undoing (CTRL/CMD+Z) that Simplify Layer step.

The final method I want to share is how to create a custom path to put your text on. This is what Janytime is interested in. The Text on Path icon is the one shown grayed out below.

I drew out a swirly flourish as my path. It helps if you can do the whole path in one smooth movement, but if you feel like you want to adjust the hesitation points like the one on the first curve on the left, click on Modify, the icon right next to Draw.

You’ll get a bunch of little black squares along the line of the path.  By clicking and dragging the black squares, you can smooth out those little imperfections.

Then, just as for the other methods, I picked a spot to start my quote and typed it out. Then I adjusted the size so the text stretched all the way to the end and Committed to current operation.

Once I simplified the layer, the path disappeared and left me with a curvy text path.

So now you know three different ways to put text on different paths. But before I go… I promised to tell you how to create a complex selection for your path.

I like stars. I was disappointed to see that there wasn’t a star included in the Text on Shape tool so I played around a little and figured out how to text around a star. I looked through my stash and found a solid star. (If you want to use something that isn’t solid you’ll need to use the Fill Tool – paint can – to fill in the open areas.) You could also use the Shape Tool (that amoeba icon in the Tools Panel) to create a shape you like. The next step would be the same.

Then I “selected” the star by holding down the CTRL/CMD key and clicking on the star thumbnail in the Layers Panel. This part is VERY important. Make sure you click on the thumbnail – that’s what will give you your selection, your marching ants.

Create a new layer above the star to put your text on. Then turn off visibility for the star layer. (Close the eye.)

Next, in the Text Tool choose the Text on Selection icon and click inside the marching ants’ shape. Start typing.

If you’re doing this technique, you don’t have to simplify the text layer to get rid of your path, all you have to do is delete the layer with the star on it.

And there you are!

I know inquiring minds want to know which method I chose for my layout. Well, you’re going to have to wait until I post it to the Font Challenge gallery later tonight when I get home from work. I’ll be looking for YOUR efforts and I’ll make sure to leave you some love.

Brush Basics – Colour

Stephanie made a comment on the Facebook tutorial post about wanting to recolour brushes. This is a really simple technique and I’m going to show you two ways to do it, as well as give you a couple of tips from my own experience that make life simpler when using brushes. As you may know, there is a Brush Challenge each month as part of GingerScraps’ community rewards Cookie Jar; the hostess for each month provides a free brush or links to a website that provides free brushes, such as Brusheezy. This challenge is hosted by the one and only Rachel Pearce – Seatrout Scraps – this month, and this tutorial will use the brush she created.

Open up your workspace and pick some papers you want to use in your layout. We’re going to pull colours from these papers. I want to do a Hallowe’en layout so I have 5 papers from Ooh La La Scraps‘ All Hallows’ Eve collection selected. I’m planning to use the neutral white stripe paper for my background, so I opened up the gold patterned paper and selected a darker area of the paper with my colour picker (the eyedropper tool).

Then I opened up the white paper on my workspace. When I use brushes I ALWAYS put them on their own layer. Why? Well, the largest dimension available within the software for brushes is 2500 pixels. If you prefer to work on 12×12 inch layouts, they’re 3600×3600 pixels. By putting the brushes on their own layers they can be resized, recoloured, altered and manipulated in many ways that they can’t be if they’re applied to the paper layer. (More about that later.) There are a couple of ways to open a new blank layer. The quickest way is to click on the icon just above your layers panel that looks like a piece of paper with one corner turned up. I’ve shown that in the screenshot below. Another quick way is to use the keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD+SHIFT+N. Or, if you prefer, you can click on the Layers menu, select New>Layer.

So now we’ve got a colour for the brush, a background paper to put it on and a new layer to apply the brush to so we can play with it. I selected Seatrout’s challenge brush from my Brush Tool menu.

I then adjusted the sliders so the brush is as big as the software will allow and the opacity is 100%. (By putting the brush on it’s own layer, you can later adjust the opacity of the LAYER and see exactly what’s happening to it!) I moved the brush onto the paper and clicked to apply it. See it there?

It’s easy to change the angle and the roundness of the brush by selecting Brush Settings as shown and playing with the sliders. You can check the angle by hovering the brush over the workspace – an outline will show up that let’s you see what it looks like. I changed the angle of the brush after I added another new layer for my next brush application.

What you see below is what I ended up with after I selected a new colour from my other papers, changed the angle on the brush and applied the brush onto a new layer. I have four brush layers and four different coloured sequin sets.

That’s the most basic way of using brushes. Now let me show you how to change the colour of your brush by using a layer mask. With the layer you want to change colour on selected in your Layers panel, click on the Layer menu as shown.

The pop-up menu looks like the screenshot below. You want to check the Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask box, then click OK.

Another pop-up menu opens with the Colour Picker. You can put your cursor anywhere on the colour swatch, or click on the rainbow column to change the colour family shown, then select the colour you like.

To make your new colour fill layer “stick” to your brush and make the brush layer adaptable, merge the two layers together by selecting them both in the Layers panel, right-click and select Merge Layers or quick-key CTRL/CMD+E.

After I recoloured all four brush layers, I started randomly erasing sequins from each layer with the Eraser tool.

By turning the visibility of the other layers off and on while erasing, I could see where I still had several different colours on the same sequin. Once I was happy with the way it looked, I turned them all on again.

Then I merged all four layers into a single brush layer.

Here’s where the manipulation capacity comes into play. By putting the brush(es) on their own layer, I can now enlarge, shrink, copy and adjust opacity at will. In the screenshot below I’ve enlarged them, but decided it wasn’t going to work for me, so I clicked on the “Null” symbol instead of the check mark and it went back to its original size.

Another way the layer can be manipulated is to change the angle and move it around, just as you do with your other elements. You can’t do this if the brush is applied right to the paper. And still another way the brush can be altered on its own layer is that you could add a shadow to it so it looks three-dimensional. (I didn’t do that here.) Now that I’m happy with what I’ve done, I can to on to finish my Brush Challenge layout.

There are lots of ways you can jazz up brushes using layer styles, but that’s a lesson for another day. If you’ve read this far and have any ideas for future tuts, let me know by commenting below. Happy scrapping!

Extractions… Choose your method

When Stephanie first proposed this series of tutorials, we decided to ask the GS community what sorts of things they’d like to learn about. Danica‘s comment was, ” I would like to know the best way to extract things out of photos. I have the worst time doing it to see if there are any tips.” Digital extraction is similar to using cuticle scissors to cut out an image from a magazine or photo print – but it’s much more forgiving. Today, I’m going to show you two ways to do it… one that takes a LONG time, and one that’s a lot quicker. The photo I chose for this demonstration presents some of the issues you might come up against in your own extractions, as you see as we move through the images.

First, the choice of photos will determine how fiddly and time-consuming the task will be. For the easiest, quickest extractions, a strong contrast between the object you want to extract and its background is paramount. This photo I found on Pixabay of a beautiful chestnut horse provided that for me.

You can open a new file on your workspace or you can create a layer from the background. That’s PSE-talk for opening your photo in PSE then putting a blank layer underneath it. To do that, right-click on your photo in the layers panel and select Layer From Background. That changes the label of the photo from Background to Layer 0. Then click on the New Layer button at the top left of the layers panel – it looks like a sheet of paper with one corner turned up. Once you have that layer in the panel you can move it below your photo, either by dragging it down or by CTLR/CMD+ [ . I like to work on a transparent background, but you should do things the way you usually do. My example below shows the photo on a 12×12 workspace, enlarged to fill most of the width.

You can remove a lot of the background in the photo fairly quickly by using the Select tool, pulling out a rectangle and then cutting the enclosed section off by clicking CTRL/CMD+X.

Once you’ve chopped off a lot of the extra stuff in your photo, then you’re ready to start cutting out your image. This first method I’m showing you is quite time-consuming and exacting and will give you the most precise extraction possible. Feel free to skim through or skip over this part completely, except for this important step: make a LAYER MASK! To do that you can go to the Layers menu then select Layer Mask>Reveal All or you can click on the Layer Mask button above the layer panel. It’s the square icon with a circle in it. Your workspace will now have a white rectangle in the layers panel on the same layer as your photo. The reason for using a layer mask is so you can fix oopses. Then select a hard brush from your Brush tool. It can be quite big for this stage.

Make sure your layer mask is selected and start erasing the background, getting as close as you can without erasing anything you want to keep. You can see your progress on the layers panel as a black splotch. BLACK CONCEALS, WHITE REVEALS. If you look at the screenshot below, you’ll see the foreground colour (way over in the lower left corner) is black.

Oops!

If you accidentally erase something you didn’t want to erase, change your foreground colour to white and paint it back in. To change your foreground colour quickly and easily, just press the X key. See how I’ve painted back some of my oops below?

Getting into smaller areas where detail is important, change the size of your brush so you can get into those little spaces. Quick key: [  (In the same way, you can use ] to make the brush bigger.) Zoom in to see what you’re doing… quick keys: CTRL/CMD + +. Zoom back out (CTRL/CMD + –) frequently so you can regain your reference regarding what you’re removing and what you want to leave.

Again, get as close as you can to the edge without going over it.

Zooming in lets you see better where you’re erasing. There’s a colour difference that may be subtle, as shown below. You can take the size of your brush down as small as a single pixel to cut those detailed spots as sharply as possible. In the screenshot below you can see each individual pixel. This is an important step if you want to keep things like hair wisps in the image. This horse has a wispy mane and a pretty hairy chin, so the detailed pixel-by-pixel erasing took a long time.

Here are some little areas of tufted hair on the horse’s ear.

Once you’ve erased all of the background areas of your photo your workspace will look like this: see the black negative outline of the horse in the layers panel? To finalize your extraction, the next step is to apply the layer mask to the photo. You can right-click on the layer then select Apply Layer Mask and then merge down so you have a single layer. Or you can simply merge the two layers, which automatically applies the layer mask. Remember how to merge layers? Select all the layers you want to merge by holding down the CTRL/CMD key and clicking on them. Then right-click and go all the way to the bottom of the dropdown menu and select Merge Layers or use the quick keys CTRL/CMD+E.

We pause this tutorial for an important message! When colours are light it’s sometimes impossible to see them against the transparent background and you might have some stray pixels you missed. This isn’t a huge problem unless you’re planning to shadow the image later. Then those stray pixels will show up like a smudge on your layout.

To make them visible, you can put a white or black fill layer underneath your finished extraction. There are two ways to do that. One is to go to the Layers menu and select New Fill Layer>Solid Color, as shown below, then selecting a white or black from the colour picker that pops up. The second way is to click on the Create Fill or Adjustment Layer button – that circle that’s half blue and half gray above the layers panel then selecting Solid Color from the dropdown menu.

Then you can easily see your stray pixels and erase them. When you’re happy with your extraction, delete the white/black fill layer, merge down and save your work as a png.

Okay. That was the long, finicky way. It took me about 3 hours from start to finish. I don’t know exactly how long it took because I stopped to make supper and eat, did a bit more erasing, talked to a friend on the phone then got back to it. The second method I’m going to show you takes a LOT less time! Some tutorials for this technique suggest using the Quick Selection tool as shown below. But that’s a frustrating way to do it. If the little brush icon isn’t exactly in the right spot, it selects a huge area that isn’t what you want. So I’m going to show you how to use the Lasso tool instead.

It took me a while to figure out how to make this tool my friend, but now that I’ve got that down, I’m going to use it a lot more! The trick to working with it is to make an enclosed shape that overlaps another already enclosed space, as shown below. See the marching ants? That’s the area I’d already included. You don’t have to be too precise with this step, just make sure the edge of the image is inside the enclosed area.

Keep making overlapping, enclosed shapes over the whole image you’re cutting out. In the screenshot below I show some detail areas where the marching ants aren’t including some of the bridle. I just made some skinny little enclosed shapes to get them into the selection. Go over the edge of the image slowly so you can see what parts aren’t selected. If you accidentally get too much of what you don’t want in the selection you can trim the excess away by selecting the icon to the right of the Add in the tool panel underneath the workspace. (See above, where the Add is selected?) The icon to the right is a Subtract command. In the same manner, enclose the area you want to subtract and close it up. Voilà! Gone! Go back to the Add command and carry on. Once you’re sure you’ve got the whole image inside the marching ants, you’re ready to move to the next step. Notice the hairs on the horse’s chin aren’t included in the selection. That’s the compromise you make with this method.

Now it’s time to refine the edge. There’s a section in the tool panel that says just that. Click on it and you’ll see a menu like shown below. Adjust the edge on your image so there’s some of the background included but not a lot. The settings I ended up with are shown. By selecting Decontaminate Colors you’ll be able to see the edge of the image a little easier. Shift the sliders a little at a time until you’ve got a nice margin of background. I recommend sending the refined edge to a New Layer and then creating a Layer Mask on it, rather than selecting New Layer with Layer Mask because it’s actually easier.

Below is what you’ll see along the edges of your image. See the area where the transparent layer shows through a little better? That’s to help you know where to cut. Make sure you’ve created a layer mask as described in the first section of the tutorial so you can still fix oopses. Then start erasing your background.

Here’s another view of the refined edge. Don’t worry too much about the hazy areas on the “good” part. They’re not really visible on the finished extraction. Keep erasing the background until you’re back where you started.

Now that you’ve erased around the entire edge, you can apply the layer mask then delete the layer with the untouched photo that was created when you refined your edge. Make very sure you’re deleting the correct layer! CTRL/CMD+Z is your best friend! When you’re done, save the image as a png so you can use it in your layout.

I’ve put the two extracted png images side-by-side here so you can see there’s no obvious difference. The main difference is that the second version, which is on the left below, took about 45 minutes instead of 3 hours. There are some very subtle differences you can see if you zoom in really tightly – the edge on the quick version is a little softer and there’s no hair on his chin- but for most purposes, this second method is more than acceptable.

Now I’ll put together a layout using my extraction and link it up so you can see it when I’m done. I hope you found some handy tips and tricks in this tutorial. Next week, I think I’ll play around with some fancy brushes.

Simple Photo Blending

Last week Carla asked if I would do a quick tutorial on blending photos into backgrounds. There’s always more than one way to do things, some quite easy, others more involved. Today we’re going to look at an easy way to blend photos, with a twist. (Caylynn had a layout in the gallery last week that caught my eye. I sorta kinda copied her example.)

So let’s get started. First, decide what photo you want to blend. I chose a photo I found on Pixabay that had some interesting aspects to it.

Next you want to choose the paper you’re going to blend it into. You can use almost anything for this, but to make it more visually interesting, pick a paper that’s got some grunge, a pattern or an obvious texture. I didn’t know what would appeal to me most so I went to my GS stash and did a tag search for “paper”. A couple of hours later, after I’d gone through them all (well, it took a few minutes) I had several that I wanted to get a feel for. So I stacked up all the papers I’d chosen and turned them off except for the bottom-most. Then I put my photo on top of the stack of papers.

The first step in the actual blending is to lower the opacity of the photo so the paper under it shows through. So I pulled the photo down to 40%.

Then I worked my way up the stack of papers, turning them on bottom to top. The screenshots show some of them so you can see the effect each of them had on the photo.

In the end I went with a solid, soft purple paper from the GingerBread Ladies’ collection By the Dozen. But it was a bit too pink to blend well so I adjusted the colour a little. You can click on Enhance>Adjust Color>Hue/Saturation then pull the sliders, or you can CTRL/CMD+U to get there in one step. (You’ve all figured out that CTRL is for Windows and CMD is for Mac, haven’t you? The keyboard shortcuts are the same otherwise.) In the screenshot below I show you how I adjusted the magenta in the paper to a more blue shade. If you look closely at the edge of the photo you can see that the edge almost disappears when I’ve got the colour right.

Once I was happy with the colour, I deleted all the other papers… except for one with a pale blue brocade pattern on it from Ooh La La Scraps‘ Carefree. I moved it on top of my pale purple paper and decreased the opacity to 40%. Now I had a nice subtle patterned paper to blend my photo into.

I should back up for a moment here. You could enlarge your photo so that it covers the whole 12×12 paper if you want and just decrease the opacity until you’re happy with it… just like I did with the second paper. If that’s what you want to do, you don’t have to read any further. If you’re reading on – what are we going to do about that very obvious edge? You might notice that in the screenshot below, I have two copies of my photo, with the top one turned off. I’ll explain that later.

The next step, getting rid of the harsh edge, required the use of the Eraser Tool and a soft brush. I have a gazillion brushes, many of which I picked up free from various sources. I chose one of the options from a collection called 20 Spray Brushes. I started off with the brush fairly small and the opacity on the brush quite low. It takes a little longer to get a good effect, but it’s easier to adjust if you go slowly at this stage.

This part is easy but can take some time. Zoom in (CTRL/CMD++) so you can see where you’re working. Gradually erase the edge of the photo so there’s no obvious demarcation between your photo and your paper. You can click-click-click or click-drag or a combination to make it a bit quicker. [Resist the temptation to increase the opaacity of your eraser brush because it’s a lot harder to undo if you go too far.]  You can also increase the size of your brush as you go.

Every so often, zoom back out (CTRL/CMD+ –) and take a look at the amount of blending you’ve done. Keep going until the photo looks like it’s part of the paper but there’s still detail visible.

Here’s where Caylynn comes in. Her layout Wanderlust got me thinking. So I decided to take things a step further and show you how using a watercolour brush can add some punch to your blend. Literally.

I added a new blank layer in between my two photo layers. I went to my Brush Tool and selected a collection of Watercolour Mask brushes. (You could use any brush of combination of brushes for this step.) I tried them out for size and shape until I found one that would cover the girl and most of her sled.

Brush settings can be adjusted to suit your purpose. You can change the angle, change the roundness and play with the other settings to really customize your brushes. You’re not committed to anything, because there’s always CTRL/CMD+Z!

Once I had the brush the shape, size and angle I wanted, I made sure the foreground colour was set to white so I’d be able to see it against my layout but it wouldn’t interfere with the colours in the photo. Then I applied my brush to that blank layer. By doing this on a blank layer, you can adjust the size, tweak the angle and even skew the shape to suit your purpose. See how the photo below shows through the brush?

Now that I was happy with the brush. I clipped the top photo to the brush (CTRL/CMD+G). See how it brightened the area of the blended photo?

Then, because I wanted her face to be completely sharp and clear, with the brush/mask layer selected, I made my brush smaller, raised the opacity to 100% and painted over the girl’s face and scarf. (I used red for the screenshot so you could see what I did.) As long as you hold your left mouse button down while you use your brush, it will maintain the set opacity even if you overlap your strokes.

See how much clearer and sharper her face is now?

This is what my brush/mask layer looked like after I was finished. I decided to sharpen her whole body and a little of her sled. Once I was happy with how it all looked, I went on to finish my layout.

So there you have some simple ways of blending photos, and a very basic mask-making lesson too! Next Tuesday I think I’ll tackle Danica’s request for some tips on extracting items from photos. It’ll build on this lesson a little, so stay tuned!

One Photo, More than One Photo Spot

Greetings Gingerscrappers! Are you ready for another Tutorial Tuesday?

Ruth posted the following when Stephanie asked what kinds of topics I should cover: “How do you add a single photo image across more than one photo spot… I see this all the time and can’t figure it out.” Well Ruth, let me show you!

I used a template from the GS Digital Scrapbooking Day 2014 mega blog hop kit called Family Game Night for this lesson, along with pieces of 5 designers’ September Buffet kits. Many scrappers like templates for the ease and speed of their workflow and templates are great for this simple technique. I chose this one because it has two photo spots, close together and aligned with each other, more for simplicity than for any other reason.

I started off by finding the two photo spots in the layers panel. I nudged them a little closer together so there was still a visible gap, but not a really obvious one.

Then I selected both photo spots in the panel and shifted them a little so they were more centered in the layout.

As I explained in my Basic Template tutorial, I like to work from the bottom up, so I laid down all the layers below the photos first. When I finally reached the first photo spot, I dragged my photo onto the template and resized it so it would crop nicely. Then I duplicated that layer. (Right click on the layer and select Duplicate Layer from the drop-down. Or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD+J.)

After moving the copy of my photo above the second photo spot in the layers panel, I clipped the photos to each photo layer. (Right click on the photo layer and select Create Clipping Mask from the drop-down, or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD+G.) When I was finished with that, this is what it looked like.

Once I had the rest of the layers filled, I didn’t like the amount of disconnect between the two sections of my photo so I nudged the bottom PHOTO SPOT layer up toward the top one a little more to close the gap. It’s still visible, but not glaringly so.

That’s all there is to it! Easy-peasy!! If you want to use a single photo to cover more spots, just keep copying the photo, moving it on top of the next photo spot and clipping it. You can do this as many times as you want… the sky’s the limit. You may need to shift some of the embellishments so they don’t cover up important parts of your photo, but you’re only limited by your imagination. The final version of my layout is here. I’ll be checking out the gallery to see if anyone has tried this over the next few days. Play with it. Have fun!

Kits used for this layout:

Aprilisa BeYouTiful elements

Connie Prince Empty Nest extra papers

Mandy King Autumn Skies wood paper

Ooh La La Scraps Autumn Chill alpha and papers

Seatrout Scraps Autumn Odyssey elements

Titles Revisited: Alphas plus Fonts

Hey all you Gingerscrappers! I’m back with another Tutorial Tuesday for your viewing pleasure. Today we’re going to build on that first lesson on titles. If you need a refresher you can find it here. Many of the kits available to digiscrappers come with matching alphabets – I’m always really happy when I find them in the kits and use them a lot. They can be combined nicely with a font or two to create very eye-catching titles and that’s what we’re focusing on today.

If you recall, I mentioned in the first titles lesson that I like to work with a new, separate file when I build my titles. It really does make it easier to see exactly what the title looks like and to line things up the way they look best. (It also helps make these tutorials easier to follow, a nice little side benefit!) One of the drawbacks with version 12 of PSE is that when you drag and drop items onto your workspace, they’re turned into “smart objects”, and are the same size as the canvas… in my case, 12×12! That’s a problem and one of the reasons I started doing titles separate from the layout. I typically use a 6×1 or 6×3 inch workspace, depending on if it’s going to be one line or several. You do what feels comfortable for you.

I worked with last month’s Daily Download, Play Ball from Connie Prince, which came with a gutsy, strong serif alpha, for this layout. I wanted a title that was a little different but still well-anchored to the topic, so I chose the title of one of my favourite baseball movies, For Love of the Game.

On my 6×3 workspace, I dropped the alpha letters as shown below; they all stack one on top of the other so I selected them all just as they were and resized them down a LOT. Then I started shifting them into place, nudging with the arrow keys.

They needed to be shrunk a few more times before they all fit onto my canvas. I decided to make the word “the” a little smaller that the word “game” so I selected those three letter layers and shrunk them a bit more. Then I lined everything up again using the bottoms of the letters. Once that was done, I selected all the layers in the palette and merged them together. I then moved the words to the bottom of the workspace so I’d have room later for my font.

Looks good! But wait, I used a charcoal paper for my background so how can I make this title stand out against it?? Oh, why don’t I paste it on some different coloured paper and make a paper border? Yeah, that’ll work. To do that, I dropped a green paper (I was going to use red but changed my mind at the last minute) UNDER the words.

Then I went to the layer with the words on it and CTRL/CMD+clicked on the thumbnail. That put some marching ants around the outside of the letters. (They’re hard to see in the screenshot, but they’re there.) I kept the layer with my green paper selected in the layers palette though.

Then, just as I did in the first lesson, I went to the Select menu and chose Modify>Expand from the drop-down menu to expand the selection by 10 pixels. The marching ants are easier to see in the screenshot below, aren’t they? (Well, except maybe in that last one. 🙁 )

Now comes the tricky part. I want to cut the paper away from the letters, and to do that I have to invert the selection. So back I went to the Select menu and chose Inverse. (Actually I used the keyboard shortcut Shift>CTRL/CMD>I.) That moves the marching ants to the outside of the paper. Next step is to cut the paper by selecting the Edit menu then Cut. CTRL/CMD>X will work too.

Et voilà!

To show that I didn’t just put a stroke around the alpha I added a drop shadow. That adds some dimension to the words. More about adding dimension to your titles in a future tut.

Now on to the font part of our show. I know from a lot of experience that if I use the exact shade of green from my paper, it’s going to look very anemic. Can’t have that! So I used the colour picker (click on the swatch in the foreground) to darken the green but keep it in the same family. I moved the cursor over and down to the right at about a 30° angle and selected a darker lime green.

I wanted a script font with a little bit of heft to it that would balance with the alpha so I chose a font called Silly Me Script. I typed out “for love of” in the space above “the GAME” and adjusted the size and alignment until it looked good. Then I made a sticker!

All that was left was to merge the layers and drop my title onto my layout. One really important thing that I can’t emphasis enough is that titles and journaling should NEVER “float” over the layout. So I put my title on a layer just above my background paper and added a narrow drop shadow to it. And there you have it! To see the whole layout, you can look here.

And that brings us to the end of this tutorial. I was really pleased to see so many sticker-ified titles in the gallery after the first tut, so I’ll be watching for some font-and-alpha combos. Have fun… see you again soon!

Happy Tuesday Gingerscrappers! Here’s the second in what I hope will be a series of tutorials to help you get the most out of your digi-scrapping stash and to grow your skills. So if you have an idea for what I should write about, please drop by the GS Facebook page and leave a comment on this thread.

Annette asked for some help using templates, so that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Every month there are two free Challenge templates provided by Gingerscraps designers, one on the first and the second halfway through the month. The reasons I mention this: they’re FREE and they’re readily available, plus they fulfill two challenges each month! Templates are a great way to speed up your workflow and to stimulate creativity.  First, they take some of the decision-making out of the process by showing where to put papers and elements. Some templates are also pre-shadowed, so that’s one fewer step to take in building a layout. But they’re not set in concrete, so there’s a lot of opportunity for making the template truly your own. Today we’re only going to stick with the basics.

There are several forms of template available out there and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in any of them. I work with PSE12 – Photoshop Elements version 12 (it presents some challenges, but I’m too cheap and suspicious to go with Creative Cloud so I’ve learned to deal with them) which is fairly versatile. You can work with PSD, TIFF or PNG files equally with PSE. The steps I’m going to show you in this tut will work with both PSD and TIFF formats. Let’s get started!

First, I choose a template that will work with the photos I want to scrap. For this lesson I’ve used the challenge template so graciously provided by Maggie of Mag’s Graphics. I used it pretty much exactly as it was presented, but you’ll soon see there are lots of ways to customize and alter any template. Stay tuned!

I open up the preview in an image viewer so I can figure out what I need to build my layout. I count up the different papers and elements then go to my Gingerscraps stash and start choosing what to use. For this layout I used September Buffet kits from Ooh La La Scraps (Autumn Chill) and Seatrout Scraps (Autumn Odyssey). I make a folder to hold the items I want to use so they’re all in one place and I can see how they look together. (Please bear in mind that this is MY workflow and I’m only making suggestions. Please don’t feel like I’m telling you the only way to do things… do what’s comfortable for you.)

One advantage to doing things this way is that if you then double-click on the PSD template file in this folder, it opens automatically in PSE and is at the very top of the photo bin. Another advantage is when you click on Open Files, the software takes you right to this folder. Once I have all the items I’m planning to use open on my workspace, I select the background paper layer in the layers panel and work my way up, the same way I would if I was using real paper and elements. You can choose to work in any order that suits you best, but this provides an orderly way of proceeding.

Start adding in your papers. The background paper is full sized in this template so it’s just a matter of dragging and dropping the paper you like onto the workspace. Mine is a tan paper. The next layer in the template’s layers panel is coloured gray and is a bit smaller than the background. You can drag and drop a paper on top of it then resize it to fit, but a much easier way is to use a clipping mask. Below you’ll note I’ve dropped a dark green paper on top of the gray layer in the layers panel. To create a clipping mask, which “clips” the paper to the shape below it, right-click on the layer and select Create Clipping Mask from the menu, or CTRL/CMD+G will accomplish the same action.

Voilà! The green paper is now neatly clipped to the gray paper layer and there is now a lovely border around the layout. I wanted to use a painted wood paper from Mandy King’s Buffet kit Autumn Skies for the most visible background layer so I dropped it on top of the white paper layer in the panel. But I also wanted the painted edges to show and that wasn’t going to work if I just clipped the paper to the layer. So I used the Move tool to select the edges and resized the paper to 93%. The best and easiest way to do this with papers like this is to click in the box at one corner of the paper and then type in the dimensions in the little tool panel boxes underneath. This method automatically centers your paper. Make sure you’ve got the Constrain Proportions box clicked so you get a uniform resize. Then you can go ahead and clip the paper to the layer below it and not lose much of the painted edge.

The next three layers in the template are papers or photos with rounded corners. Maggie has each of these paper blocks on their own layer so you can clip different papers to each one if you choose. I wanted them all the same, so I selected all three layers and merged them together, then clipped a single aqua polka dotted paper to the resulting layer in the palette. I could have copied the paper three times and done each layer individually but I’m lazy.

I did the same thing with the two rounded rectangles on the right side of the template and clipped a tan, polka dot paper to it. But when I looked at it, my first reaction was BLAHHH!

So I deleted that layer and went with a lovely burgundy plaid paper instead. Ah, MUCH better! That’s one of the beauties of using templates. You can clip 15 different papers to a shape then turn them on one at a time to see which one you like best, then delete the ones you don’t.

The dark green strip along the left edge of the template could be a paper strip, a ribbon, ricrac or stitches… or even a combination of all of them. I decided to use a piece of ricrac.

I really wanted to have the same dark green matting my photos as was used for the second layer of the border, but the template didn’t have separate mats for the photos, as I discovered when I clipped my green paper to one of the photo spots.

To get around that, I copied the photo layers – right-click, select Duplicate Layer then click OK on the pop-up menu, or simply CTRL/CMD+J – then resized the copy layers to make a nice mat border around what would become my photos.

Clipping photos to photo spots is just the same as for clipping papers to shapes. I like to use the corner of the photo spot to line up my photo when the photo spot is tilted, like these are, unless I’m not worried about how the photo crops. Don’t worry too much about the size of the photo at this step, because you can resize it and position it once you’ve clipped it to the spot.

Things will start to move a lot faster once the background and photos are in place. This template, being a simple one, has only 3 different elements positioned in each corner. I chose a string flower with a button center, a flower that looks somewhat like a chrysanthemum and a grapevine ring. I decided that both clusters would contain the same items, as shown in the template through the use of identical shapes, but feel free to use whatever elements in whatever combo you want. Working from the bottom up, the next layer is the tan daisy shape. Drop an element onto your workspace and resize it a bit so you can see what you’re doing, then move it in place under the shape on the template, as shown. This will help with positioning and sizing. If you’re using a pre-shadowed template, you can copy the template’s shadow for that layer by right-clicking on the shape layer in the layers palette and selecting Copy Layer Style from the menu. Sorry, no keyboard shortcut for that. Once you’re happy with it, you can go ahead and delete or turn off the shape layer. (I ALWAYS work with copies of files so I don’t accidentally throw out something I might want to use again, so I can delete.)

The template showed a circular element with an open centre so I thought I’d use a grapevine ring for that.

But… it wasn’t working for me once I did it. So I swapped it out for a dried orange slice. It looked a little funny lying overtop of a fairly fluffy flower, so I moved it down a couple of layers to where it sat flush against the paper, then repositioned it a little.

For the cluster in the opposite corner, I duplicated the three layers I just placed as described above and moved them up and into position, using the shapes provided by the template for placement. Took all of about 3 seconds! Then I dropped some buttons on the layout – lo! and behold… that brought me to the top of the template’s layers. Almost done.

Now that all of the papers, photos and elements are in place, it’s time to shadow. I use a set of shadow styles by Mommyish most often, but you can use the drop shadows supplied with your software. (Getting into how to obtain realistic shadows in detail is beyond the scope of this tutorial.) I like to do this task in the most efficient way possible, so I select like layers and shadow them all at once. Then later, if I find it looks a bit funny, I can go back and tweak only the layers necessary.

The final steps are title and journaling. The challenge template doesn’t have a defined area for either but there are some nice open spots so I chose to journal on the upper burgundy paper and put my title on the lower aqua paper. If you’d like to see the final result, it’s in my gallery.

In the coming weeks, I’ll share some tips on how to get the most out of templates so keep an eye on the blog!