The Sprague Lab

Hi There!

Happy Photoshop Friday! We had a fun chat last night, and I think people had some good success with this technique. It’s one of my favorites for adding depth and dimension to a digi page in a way that paper simply can’t match.

So here we go. :)

Fading a Photo into the Background

This technique works best with a medium-colored solid paper as your background. This means kraft, a medium blue, medium yellow, pink, that kind of thing. Texture is great, but no patterns.

To complete a layout, you’ll need at least two photos, with one you’ve chosen as the main and one you’ve chosen as an accent.

Here again is my example layout:

Supplies (All from DesignerDigitals):

• Brown paper: You & Me Mini kit by Mindy Terasawa
• Blue paper: Thelma kit by Jackie Eckles
• Stripe paper, round accents: A Boy kit by Jackie Eckles
• Flourish brush (white): A La Mode brush set by Mary Ann Wise
• Flourish brushes (blue): On the Edge Flourishes No. 2 brush set by Katie Pertiet (this is probably my favorite new product to come out in the past month. I am using these ALL the time)
• Title: 2nd Hand Titles brush set by Katie Pertiet
• And my always favorite sanded Grunge Overlay by Katie Pertiet

Let’s get started.

1. Open a new blank layout, 12x12, 300 dpi, RGB color, white background.

2. Open and drag a digital patterned paper onto your layout. I used a nice brown from Mindy Terasawa’s You & Me Mini Kit. 

3. Open your accent photo and drag that onto your layout as well. I positioned mine in the bottom left corner.

Click for Larger 4. With your photo layer targeted, at the top of the Layers palette, drop down the blending mode selector (it says “Normal”, and set it to EITHER “Overlay” or “Soft Light”. Both of these work for this technique - and either one might look better depending on your paper/photo combination. So try them both, and stick with what looks best to you. :)

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5.  Select your Rectangular Marquee tool. In the Options Bar at the top of your screen, type something like 100 in the Feather box (120 if you’re feeling saucy). Click and drag a rectangle around your photo. With feathering on, your selection will look very rounded. I moved my selection so that the left and bottom edges were actually off of the edge of my layout. That way my photo extends all the way to the corners of the paper, rather than feathering out in all directions. This is your choice, though. :)

Click for Larger 6. Go to Select > Inverse to switch your selection to everything BUT your original selection.

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7. Hit Delete. And if this isn’t quite enough feathering, you can hit Delete again with that same selection still active to erase a bit more of the photo. Here’s how mine came out:

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CS/CS2 Trick

I know a lot of people are using CS/CS2/CS3 these days. So I’m going to include the PSE/Everyone way, and then some extra tips for CS/CS2 users.

The way I would accomplish this same task in CS/CS2, is with a layer mask.

Follow steps 1-5 above. So you’ll be starting here, with your feathered rectangular selection over your photo:

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You’ve got just one step now. In your Layers palette (Window > Layers), target your photo layer and click the Add Vector Mask button at the bottom of the Layers palette (it looks like a rectangle with a circle in the middle of it.

You get the exact same effect as the Invert > Delete technique above, but you create a layer mask which simply masks out a portion of the photo, rather than deleting it. This is called non-destructive editing, and is a really important concept among professional graphic designers and photographers. By deleting, you are basically throwing data away, and if you’ve done much to your photo (say you did some color correction, some curves, sharpened, etc., then deleted part of your photo and then changed your mind, you’d have no way (past the 20-steps back in the History) to go back and re-do. With a layer mask, you can simply throw the mask away and start over, or better yet, edit the mask that you have with your brush tools. That’s right, even graphical brushes can be used on masked photos. I’d love to see some stuff using that combo.

Can’t wait to see what you make with our Photo-fade technique! I love the depth this gives, not only visually, but in telling the story as well - accent photos always deepen the story on your page, and this is a great way to add one (or more!)

Have a wonderful weekend!

psst. I didn’t send an email out to The List for this week. That will go out today, so if you’re worried that I kicked you off or my email is going into (*gasp*) your spam box or something, neither of those is probably true. Definitely not the first one :). Look for a great coupon code from DesignerDigitals in this week’s email! Because Katie and the team there love ya, and so do I. :D

-J