{"id":57748,"date":"2025-07-08T13:13:03","date_gmt":"2025-07-08T20:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/?p=57748"},"modified":"2025-07-08T13:13:03","modified_gmt":"2025-07-08T20:13:03","slug":"tutorial-tuesday-photoshop-elements-250","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/2025\/07\/tutorial-tuesday-photoshop-elements-250\/","title":{"rendered":"Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greatest Hits: Abstract Meets Graphic Art<\/strong><\/p>\n

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For this month’s Perfectly Paired Challenge<\/strong><\/a><\/span><\/span>, Dani<\/strong><\/span> wants to see your artsy side. That made me think of this tutorial from 2017. I think I might do exactly this as the basis for my Challenge<\/strong><\/span> layout. Then, of course, I’ll have to combine bits from two kits to fulfill the rest of the Challenge<\/strong><\/span> requirements. I’m sure I have some kits in my stash that have brushes, overlays, paint and other artsy elements in them that I can massage into a cohesive layout. Wanna give it a try? (If you’re impatient, by all means scroll down to the end to see the finished product. \ud83d\ude09 )<\/p>\n

To begin, you\u2019ll need a great photo with a relatively plain background, because the image will be extracted. This photo of a skateboarder from Pixabay<\/strong> was a great choice for my example since my inspiration for the tutorial came from an image of a skateboarder. I dropped it on a white paper for the initial steps to make extraction easier.<\/p>\n

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I used the\u00a0Magic Wand tool<\/strong>\u00a0to extract my image.\u00a0This tutorial<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0will provide a refresher for you if you\u2019re still getting the hang of extracting images. You can duplicate your photo now, or wait until you\u2019ve got your extraction complete or the line of marching ants in place. But you will need to duplicate your photo. Make your duplicate layer invisible.<\/p>\n

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Working on the extracted photo, I clicked on the\u00a0Filter menu<\/strong>, selected\u00a0Stylize<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Find Edges<\/strong>\u00a0as shown. Remember when\u00a0I showed you<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0how to do this?<\/p>\n

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Once the image has been filtered, some of the colour from the image is still visible. Right now, I don\u2019t want that. It looks a bit odd.<\/p>\n

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So to remove that hint of colour, I chose\u00a0Enhance>Adjust Color>Hue\/Saturation<\/strong>\u00a0(CTRL\/CMD>U<\/strong>) and pulled the\u00a0Saturation<\/strong>\u00a0slider all the way to the left. That leaves only the sketch.<\/p>\n

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We didn\u2019t do this in the\u00a0Sketchy tutoria<\/strong>l, but for this one it\u2019s a vital step.\u00a0Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Levels<\/strong>\u00a0will take you to the menu shown. What this step does is dramatically darken the lines in the sketched image.<\/p>\n

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The\u00a0histogram<\/strong>\u00a0shown below is part of the adjustment menu. You can adjust both sections simply by pulling the sliders. Make sure you can see your image so you know when you\u2019ve gone far enough. If you need to move the dialog box, click and hold the gray bar at the top of the box then drag it up, down or to one side so you can see what\u2019s underneath it. I wanted my background area to stay bright white and my sketch to be darker and more detailed. The changes I made are shown in the dialog box.<\/p>\n

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Now I have what looks like a charcoal drawing of the skateboarder. I want to have some of the colour from the original image in there, so I selected the topmost layer and added an adjustment layer mask by\u00a0ALT>click<\/strong>ing on the\u00a0Layer Mask<\/strong>\u00a0icon<\/strong>\u00a0(the divided circle icon above the\u00a0Layers panel<\/strong>). The image disappeared but was really still there. I just had to reveal it.<\/p>\n

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I used a medium-sized soft round brush from the default brushes PSE comes with to paint back the colour, working on the\u00a0Layer Mask<\/strong>. By using a low opacity (20%) I was able to build up colour where it naturally would appear darker and keep other areas much lighter. When you hold down your mouse button as you paint, you can overlap your brush strokes and have no visible overlap. Once you release the mouse button, the tool resets and areas of overlap will be darker. You want to brush over the whole area in one step to avoid those overlap spots. Keep that in mind as you go so you don\u2019t end up with streaks.<\/p>\n

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Once I had the colour the way I wanted it, I\u00a0Simplified<\/strong>\u00a0the layer. (Right-click<\/strong>\u00a0on the layer in the\u00a0Layers panel<\/strong>\u00a0and select\u00a0Simplify Layer<\/strong>.) That step merges the mask with the image and prevents me from messing it up.<\/p>\n

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Now for the really fun stuff! I added a new blank layer underneath the sketch layer then used a watercolour brush at\u00a0100% Opacity<\/strong>\u00a0from my\u00a0collection of free brushes<\/a>. I had an idea what colours I wanted to use so I just played around with both colour and brush selection until I liked what it looked like. By putting each brush\u00a0on its own layer<\/strong>\u00a0I can resize it, reposition it, decrease the opacity of it, increase the opacity by duplicating the layer, position it above or below my sketch and photo layers and whatever whim enters my head.<\/p>\n

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I experimented with lots of different watercolour and grunge brushes, deleting the layers that just didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

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If you look closely you\u2019ll see I\u2019ve made a lot of changes by adding and subtracting, shifting and overlaying layers. You might also notice that the original photo colours are darker in this image. I duplicated the topmost simplified colour layer from the\u00a0Layer Mask<\/strong>\u00a0step then adjusted the opacity of that duplicate layer until I liked it.<\/p>\n

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To add a little more grunge and graphic feel I chose a gray colour and used a\u00a0free graph paper brush<\/a>\u00a0that I duplicated and rotated. One layer is above the sketch and one is below it.<\/p>\n

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For the finishing touch I added some tiny gray\u00a0splatters<\/a>\u00a0on top of all the layers and some below. \u00a0The process is one of playing with your stash and experimenting with things you never thought you could do.<\/p>\n

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I saved the finished image as a .png file for even more versatility. This is what it looks like with no paper behind it.<\/p>\n

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Now to find a good photo, decide on a theme and get to work!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greatest Hits: Abstract Meets Graphic Art For this month’s Perfectly Paired Challenge, Dani wants to see your artsy side. That made me think of this tutorial from 2017. I think I might do exactly this as the basis for my Challenge layout. Then, of course, I’ll have to combine bits from two kits to fulfill […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[229,102,284,92,62],"tags":[373],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-18 11:51:40","action":"change-status","newStatus":"private","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57749,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57748\/revisions\/57749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gingerscraps.net\/gsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}