Photoshop Friday! {Issue #11}

Don’t forget that I sneaked in another PS Friday on Monday, just trying to get caught up. So if you missed it, read back a couple of posts. :)

This week’s PS Friday comes by special request from a few people, and most recently from Tara. So thanks for the request, and here goes:

Selective re-coloring of black-and-white photos.
Like this:


First, we need a color photo.
I’ll use this one:

The first thing we need to do is duplicate our original image.

1. In the layers palette, right-click on the photo name, and choose Duplicate Layer from the popup menu.
2. Now target the new layer.
3. Go to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate (PSE: Enhance > Adjust Color > Remove color.

Now we have a really crappy black and white conversion. In almost all cases, you’ll want to do some tweaks to your photo, such as boosting the contrast. You could add a gradient map adjustment layer like in this PS Friday: http://photoshopfriday.blogspot.com/2006/06/ps-friday-issue-8.html
And you’ll just need to merge that adjustment layer down before continuing on.

OR

You could open the Levels window, Image > Adjustments > Levels (PSE: Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Levels).

Adjusting Levels to Boost Contrast
Drag the white slider toward the left, and adjust the middle (grey) slider to set the midtones (not too dark, not too light). When you’re happy with the contrast boost, hit OK in that window and we’re ready to add some color back in.

Adding Color back to the Photo
The key to this technique is that we duplicated the photo and converted the top copy to black and white, so we have an undisturbed copy below this layer. We’ll use the eraser tool to erase through our black and white layer, showing the color layer down below. And after that I’ll give a lecture about non-destructive editing. :)

The Eraser Method:

1. Grab the eraser tool from the toolbar, choose a small, hard-edged brush.
2. Zoom in on your image to get a nice view of it.
3. Now simply erase all the bits that you would like to be in color, and the bottom layer will begin to show through.

This works just fine as a quick-and-dirty method. When you make a mistake, you can simply Ctrl-z to undo.

Next opportunity I get, we’ll talk about using layer masks instead of the eraser tool for non-destrctive editing. And won’t that be fun? :)

Have a wonderful weekend!

Photoshop Friday... er... Monday! :D

Okay, as promised, here is how to make this cool 4-square photo:
I put one of these on a paper layout I did for my HOF entry this year. I think they are really cool, and a great way to add a little journalistic AND artistic flair at the same time.

For this PS Friday, we’ll still be focusing on the marquee tool, but we’re going to create a compound selection, rather than just a simple square or circle.

1. Open 4 photos.
2. Do the editing you want to them.
3. Open a new 12x12 blank document, and drag all of your photos onto it.
4. Turn on the rulers. (View > Rulers)
5. Use the Edit > Scale command (or in PSE, just drag the handles) until each photo is no larger than 4 inches in width. (this just determines how much of the photo you’ll be able to see - you can go more or less here)

Let’s make this a 6-inch accent.

1. Select the Elliptical marquee tool.
2. In the Options bar at the top of the screen, select Fixed Size from the Style dropdown box. Type in 6 and 6 in the size boxes to get a perfect 6-inch circle.
3. Click once anywhere in your document to see a perfect 6-inch circle.
   
4. With the marquee tool selected, move the selection up into the top corner, right next to the rulers. This will make the cutting easier. Let’s turn on the Grid (View > Show > Grid), and also the Snap feature, which turns our ruler lines into little magnets. (Also, if you have CS or CS2, you can drag a guide line out to the 3-inch mark both horizontally and vertically, so you can line up your cutting marquee)

What we actually want is a quarer-circle pie shape. So let’s make a compound selection.

1. Select the Rectangle marquee tool (while the circle selection is still active).
2. Now hold down the Alt key. You should see a little minus sign appear next to the cursor. This means that whatever you select now will actually erase from your current selection.
3. Click and drag while you hold the Alt key - a rectangle covering over half of your circle. When you release the mouse, you’ll see that you’ve actually cut your selection in half.
4. Now let’s do the horizontal cut. Hold down the Alt key, and drag a rectangle across the bottom half of your selection, right at the 3-inch grid line. Just before you release your mouse, you should see something like this: (See the minus-sign cursor?)
   

Selection
So now you have your quarter-pie selection.

1. With the marquee tool still selected, drag the selection over your photo, target it in the layers palette.
   
2. Now go to Select > Inverse, and hit Delete to delete the excess photo.

Congratulations! You have your first pie slice done! :)

Finishing up, for PSE:
If you have PSE, you’ll need to re-draw the circle and create the compound selection for each of the pie shapes (top right, bottom right, bottom left). Then simply Select > Inverse, target the second photo layer, and hit Delete, and so on until you have each quadrant done.

Finishing up, for PSCS and above:
If you have PSCS or above, you have a cool feature in your selection tools: Transform selection. With your selection still active, go to Select > Inverse to return to your original pie-shaped selection. Now you can go to Select > Transform selection, and use the rotation handles to rotate your selection (hold Shift while you rotate to constrain to 45 or 90 degrees). Then Select > Inverse, target the second photo layer, and hit Delete.

So you can go through and cut each quadrant of your circle.

Final Touches

Let’s target the bottom right photo in the Layers palette.
Now let’s move the Opacity slider in the Layers palette to somthing like 40% (more or less depending on the original lightness of the photo).

Now we can add some text to this area. If you want to journal here, that would be fun, or you can simply put a subtitle or a date.

Here’s how mine ended up:

This also looks GREAT printed out and cut in the circle shape with just a teeny bit of white photo paper showing around the edge. Hybrid scrapping at its best! :D

Have a great night!

Photoshop Friday! {Issue #10}

Today’s PS Friday comes to you courtesy of some work I’ve been doing this week - not necessarily in the tutorial side of Photoshop, but in the product-creation side.

And I’ve been having such a great time doing PS Friday, and I’m so thankful to all of you guys, who come and read and learn and get inspired and go MAKE THINGS. That’s what this is all about to me. And I love ya.

So. In honor of that, I present to you this freebie, I made just for the PS Friday-ers (dang it! we need a new name). These are some of my first papers, and I hope you enjoy them. I called the kit LoveYa. :D

Download the zip file by clicking on the image or clicking here


And there is one other reason for celebration. Ali spilled the good word on her blog the other day, so I figure it’s safe now. (Right? Safe?) And the newsletter has gone out announcing the web site and all.

So here goes.

Ready?

Set?

Ladies, start your software!

Vroom!

Okay. I’m a tease. But hey, it’s my blog, right? I can do that.

Starting in August, I will be teaching a series of online digital scrapbooking classes for CKU Home Study, the new Creating Keepsakes online classroom. More details to come. But I’m so excited! The courses will be geared to anyone who has Photoshop Elements or PS7, CS, or CS2 and will be targeted toward different skill levels.

I will post more details as I’m able, but I just can’t hold this secret in any more. :D

I will return next week with a tutorial, I promise. Have a wonderful weekend, and if you use the freebie, link me up ok? I would love to see.

Photoshop Friday! {Issue #9!}

For this creation, we’re going to start with a 4-square configuration with patterned paper. To do this, we’ll need some really specific measurements, so we’ll be taking advantage of the Grid and Snap to Grid features in Photoshop. And then we’ll throw a circle element into the mix. So here we go! :)

1. Open a new document, 12x12, 300 dpi, white background.
2. Drag 4 cool patterned papers onto your canvas. (Here’s a great chance to mix and match kits for a fun look.)
3. For this, we’ll need some accurate measurements, so turn on rulers (View > Rulers). If yours aren’t showing measurements in inches, you can change this in the Preferences (Edit > Preferences).

Setting up the Grid

If you are using a full version of Photoshop, you can drag guide lines out from the rulers to help you. I love these for lining things up. Simply start dragging with your cursor over the ruler and drop the blue guide wherever you like. BUT, since Elements doesn’t have guides, we’ll be using the grid instead.

First we need to make sure that the grid is showing in inches.
1. Go to Edit > Preferences, and choose Grid from the flyout menu (in CS and CS2 it’s called “Guides, Grid & Slices”.
2. Set the measurement to 1 inch, and set the number of dividers to 4.
3. Hit OK.
4. In the View menu, make sure that Grid and Snap to Grid are both selected (in CS and CS2 the command is View > Show > Grid and View > Snap). Snap to Grid ensures that all our selections and elements line up nicely in quarter-inch increments. Very handy.

Alright! Now we are ready to do some selection.

Selecting using the Rectangle Marquee tool

1. Using the Rectangle marquee tool, select the top left quadrant on the first patterned paper. (a 6-inch square)
HINT: When you are dragging a selection with the marquee tools, hold down Shift to keep the proportions a perfect square or a perfect circle.
2. Now we need to delete all the paper EXCEPT the square we’ve selected. So we’ll go to Select>Inverse.
You should see your selection change to a reverse L-shape.
3. Hit Delete.

Now you can repeat these steps by selecting the next patterned paper, using the marquee tool to select a 6-inch square, inverting the selection and deleting.

When you are finished with all 4 layers, you should have a 12x12 canvas that looks like this:

Now you’ll turn that 4-square into a single sheet of paper to keep working with it.

Merging Layers

1. With the Move tool selected, hold down the shift key and click on each of your four layers one by one. You should see them all select in your layers palette, either by highlighting or by the appearance of a little chain-link icon next to the thumbnail.
2. Go to Layer > Merge Linked (In PSCS and above, Layer > Merge Layers). In your layers palette you should see a single layer with the four squares, and the background layer.

Cutting spaces between the papers

1. Using the rectangle marquee, draw a 1/4 inch selection horizontally across your 4-square paper (this is where the grid comes in handy). Position the selection exactly over the line where the patterns meet:

2. Hit delete.
3. If you are using PSCS or above, you can use the Select>Transform Selection to rotate your selection 90 degrees. If you are using PSE, simply redraw the selection vertically.
4. Position the selection exactly over the line where the papers meet.
5. Hit delete.

Cutting with the Elliptical Marquee
In this next section, we will be cutting a large circle out of the middle of the 4-square paper, to use as a design element. We’ll work on other options with the selection tool, including constraining a selection to exact dimensions, drawing a circle from the center point, and saving and loading a selection.

1. Select your Elliptical Marquee tool.
2. In the Options bar at the top of the screen, choose Fixed Size from the Mode drop-down box.
3. Type in 6in and 6in in the boxes. This will automatically draw you a perfect 6-inch circle.

Now for a cool trick:
4. Position your crosshair cursor in the exact center of your document (again, the grid comes in handy).
5. While holding the Alt key, click once. You should see a 6-inch circle with its centerpoint at the place you clicked.

Another note: the Alt key works for Normal selections, too, if you like drawing out from the center rather than dragging diagonally.

Now let’s Save this selection (even though we can re-draw it in an instant with our constrained marquee tool, saving and loading is a good thing to know for more complex selections).


6. Choose Select > Save Selection. Type an identifiable name in the box, such as CircleMarquee.
7. Hit OK.

Cut and Rotate a Selection

1. With your 4-square paper active, hit Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V to cut the circle selection and paste it into a new layer. (You may have to nudge your circle back into place with the Move tool selected using the arrow keys).
FOR PSE:

2. With the circle layer active, choose Image> Transform> Free transform.
3. In the options bar at the top of your screen, the third box from the left has a little angle next to it. This is the rotation. Type 90.

FOR PSCS and above:
With the circle layer active, choose Edit > Transform > Rotate 90 degrees.

You should now see an image like this:


Load Selection
One more step and we’ve prepped our image for a layout :) The circle would look better if it had some space cut around it. Let’s do that next. We are going to use the same circle selection, but expand it just a bit.

First, we need to load up the selection we saved earlier.

1. Go to Select > Load Selection and choose CircleMarquee from the dropdown list. You’ll see your saved selection activate.
2. Go to Select > Modify > Expand. Type 50 into the box to expand the selection by 50 pixels in every direction.
3. In the layers palette, make sure the 4-square paper layer (NOT the circle layer) is active. Hit Delete.

Now we are all set for making a layout with this great foundation. Here’s what I came up with:


Product credits:
All of the papers except the diamond are from Summer Simmon’s Citrus Grove Kit.
The diamond paper is from Jackie Eckles’ Greeley Kit.
The alphabet strips are from Katie Pertiet.
The font I used for the journaling is TXT Stonewashed. (The date one is Impact)
And of course few layouts would be complete without Katie Pertiet’s Sanded Overlay. (All that grunge for a buck fifty! Amazing!)

Have a wonderful and safe weekend. Link me up when you get finished with your 4-square layout design! :D

Photoshop Friday! {Issue No. 9!}

Wow! Welcome to PS Friday week 9.

Today’s week is just a little different, as it doesn’t necessarily involve a step-by-step tutorial, but some inspiration and examples to get you started (or help you get further) down the road of one of my favorite Photoshop tools:

Blending modes.

Dum.Dum.Duuuuuuuuum.

(Darn, I wish this blog had real sound effects.)

So I thought about giving you a quick run-down of all the various blending modes before setting out to show examples, but I discovered (while looking at the Photoshop help), that they are intensely mathematical. And math + Jes has never been a good combo. So rather than copy and paste the schtuff from the help (which you are MORE than welcome to go read..), I’ll just say that nainly the trick here is to know in GENERAL what is going to happen to your layer if you choose a specific blend mode, and then experiment. :) Happy accidents happen to me all the time this way. :)

Here is the example layout for blending modes:
(I saved this one larger on purpose, so you could enlarge it for detail. Just click on it to see it larger.)

You can see all the layer blending modes at the very top of the layer palette.

My favorites are: Multiply, Color Burn, Screen, Color Dodge, Overlay, and Soft Light. The others produce pretty specific results that I’m not necessarily looking for. So these are my first choices.

Multiply and Color Burn will both make the layer look darker.
Screen, Color Dodge, and Soft Light will make the layer look lighter, and Overlay will go dark or light depending on the color of the things inside the layer, as well as what is below it.

The beauty of blending is that you can experiment with multiple modes and really see what will work best.

Here is the run-down of all the blending modes (and opacities) I used in the layout above, to give you some examples and ideas:

I used a text paper over the enlarged photo, from Jen Wilson’s Being kit.
Brushes are from the Designing With Digital CD, from Rhonna Farrer
Striped paper is from Kellie Mize’s kit called Boogie Star over at DesignerDigitals.
Frame brushes are from Katie Pertiet’s Edges kit (DesignerDigitals)
Sanded brushes are from the Digital Distressing Kit over at Scrap Artist
Sanded overlay around the outside is from Grunge Overlays by Katie Pertiet (DesignerDigitals)
Title font is Danette Outline, from Fonthead.

I can’t wait to see your experiments with blending modes! Especially blending papers over one another or onto photos, or blending brushes! Some VERY cool stuff can happen if you just take the time to play.

Don’t forget to post a link to what you create!

Have a wonderful Friday and a great weekend! :)