Category — tutorials

As I was packaging up my latest release It occurred to me that some of you might not be aware of a really easy way to recolor elements that I use all of the time. Before I get into this quick tutorial, let’s start things of with freebie!

Word Art Originals No. 1

We’ll download this one the old fashioned way here.

I’m sad to say I’m having problems with my new store plugin. It’s not sending emails the way it is supposed to. I’m REALLY bummed about this because it means I may be back to square one with my store and back to something much more complicated . Please email me if you have any problems with a purchase, or in downloading any of my other freebies. I can send the links out manually, but the auto emails don’t seem to be working right. Thanks for your patience!

And now for the Tutorial

How many of you know how to lock the transparent pixels on a layer in photoshop or photoshop elements? Many of you may know this trick, but if you don’t, this is really going to come in handy! I work in photoshop, but I looked it up and this should work in elements as well.

As an example, lets say you just love my new word art freebie but the problem is that you want to use it in a layout with a dark background. I’ll show you an easy way to change the color of a single element that is all one color (such as the word happiness by it self) as well as how to change just part of an element if you don’t want to effect the whole layer.

1) The the first thing you need to do is to select the layer.
2) Then click on the “lock transparent pixels” icon in the layers pallet. (see tutorial image 1 below)

After you click that icon, your layers pallet should look like tutorial image 2 below. Because I don’t have pse, I’m just showing an example of how I think it will look. It should be similar to what you see in the photoshop pallet.

Now if you a re-coloring a single element like the word happiness on a layer by it self, the next step 3) would be to go to the select menu and choose all, or press command A ( ctr A on a pc). You will also need to choose a color. In the example I will use white, but you can also use the eyedropper tool to choose any color you might want to use. 4) Once you have chosen your color go to edit – fill. You can choose foreground color, background color, or you can also choose color to to select a new color (rather than the eyedropper tool). (see tutorial image 3 below)

Now, if you look at tutorial image 4 below you will see that this method worked well for the word happiness by it self, but if you use select all on an element like the word art cluster the results are not very good.

For an element such as this, which has several different colors of text, as well as some full color elements we can use a slightly different process to change the words that are brown, to white. Follow steps 1) and 2) above. Now instead of choosing select – all, use the marque tool (see tutorial image 5) to select just the word “this”. with that selected, hold the shift key and marque around the words “is boundless”. Holding the shift key will add to the selection. You should now have two boxes of “marching ants” around the text that is brown.

Now fill with a color of your choice as in step 4). This will fill only the areas selected with the marque tool, and the transparent areas will also remain unchanged.

So there you have it. Hope this tutorial is helpful. Oh, one last trick. Once you have an area (all or marque) selected you can press option delete to fill with the foreground color and command delete to fill with the background color (probably option and ctrl. on a pc).

As I mentioned in my recent post, I won first place in a recent Designer Spotlight challenge at Oscraps featuring Danielle Young. I decided this design would make a great template and to celebrate the launch of my blog, I’m excited to offer my first freebie, Template Originals No.1, a layered template. You can download a copy of the files here.

And Now for the Tutorial
I will now provide a tutorial demonstrating how to create the blended photo in the background. I am hoping that this will work for those of you who use PSE, and apologize in advance if it doesn’t. I only have experience using photoshop®, but hopefully I know enough of the differences to make this work.   Should you run into problems, I would encourage you to experiment with blending on your own to see what you can achieve. The possibilities are endless.

This first screen shot shows the layer structure that you will see when you first open the file.

I would recomend that you immediately go to file – save as and create a new file name  for the layout you are creating. This will keep the original template file intact for future use. The first layer labeled “guide_delete” is for reference only and includes some notes. You can delete this layer once you have completed your layout.

The next step is to choose a photo and drag in into your file. Make sure that this new layer is directly above the layer labeled “mask photo here”. Once you have positioned the photo and sized it as you would like it to appear you will need to duplicate the layer 4 times (so that there are a total of 5 copies of the photo). To do this, click on the photo layer and right click then choose duplicate layer. This is demonstrated in the image below.

Once you have 5 copies of the photo, drag 2 thru 5 down, positioning one above each of the layers labeled “photo blend…” as illustrated below. Be sure to leave one in place above the “mask photo here” layer.

Once you have the layers in place, right click on each of the 5 photo layers, and choose create clipping mask. This will mask each photo layer to the shape on the layer below (this is a very handy trick that I just learned recently. How did I not know this before, sheesh! very cool)

Okey dokey! We are now ready to play with blending modes (this is the fun part!). In order for this to work properfly, we must first make the layer masks permanent on photos 2 thru 5 (you can leave the first photo as is). To do this, right click on each of these 4 layers and choose merge down.

Now feel free to play around with blending modes and opacity (transparency) on each of these 4 blended photo layers. You will see that I have labeled each layer with the blending mode and opacity percentage that I used on each layer. Depending on the background paper you use, different settings may work better. For instance, because I had a flat color background on this example file, instead of the textured paper used in the original design, I had to adjust the opacity down a bit on 2 of the layers for it to look right. In the end, you should end up with something similar to what you see below.

Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoy this template and find the tutorial easy to follow. I’d love to see what you create. Feel free to post a link to your layout in a comment below.