Quick Tip Tuesday – Get Texturized!

One of my favorite things about digital scrapbooking is going to live-and-in-person crops!  In addition to having a small group of local digi-junkies, we have a thriving community of paperscrappers who tolerate us breezing in with our little totebags and laptops to their crops.

They’re always curious (even when they try not to show it) about what we do.  So I often pull out my albums and leave them lying on the table for people to look at, which will start the conversation.  They’ll pick up the book and flip through the pages slowly, politely commenting here and there.  But I know I’ve got them when I catch them TOUCHING THE PAGE!  Inevitably, someone will surreptitiously slide an index finger across the page to see if she can feel the edge of the “paper”. That’s when we start the “bet you thought digital layouts were too flat and boring” conversation.

One of the secrets to creating touch-tempting layouts (aside from good shadows) is texture.  Paperscrappers are accustomed to textured cardstock like Bazzill makes. So early on in my digi career I learned to add texture to my papers.

One way to do that is the Texturizer filter.  This filter allows you to use any image to add a texture to your image – and it’s simple to use in both PS and PSE.

Here’s how:

• In the Menu Bar choose Filter> Texture> Texturizer. You’ll get a full page dialog  box, with a bunch of sliders on the right.
• In the box where it says Texture: you can pull down the menu and choose one of four preset textures. (More about how to add your own later!)
• Move the Scaling slider to the right, and notice how the image in the preview window at the left changes.  Be careful when you scale up, some textures will look ‘soft’ or blurry scaled over 100%.
• Move the Relief slider to the right to change how strong the effect appears.  What this does is makes the highlights and shadows stronger (lighter and darker).
• You can change the direction the light is hitting your texture with the pull down menu next to Light:
• Try checking the Invert box for a different look.

Tips:

• Zoom out. The preview window automatically opens up at 100% – this shows you what your eye will be able to perceive when you print the page.  But if you don’t intend to print, (or even if you do) you may want to zoom out to see what it will look like.  NOTICE that the look is MUCH worse at odd zooms:
  
  the image to the left is at 25%, the one on the right is 25.725. Notice how different they look!  So don’t be freaked out if it looks funny, if it looks good at 100% it will print fine.
• Don’t overdo the Relief – the noisy effect you see on the right above is worse the higher the Relief setting.  Keep it subtle, really you only want people to be able to see it if they look.
• Check for repeats – sometimes the image that is used to create the texture creates obvious patterns where it repeats.  Sometimes this is ok, other times not.  So when you zoom out, check to see if you see and obvious pattern, and if you like it that way!

Making your own texture:

Any image can be used to make a texture. For papers images of fabric, woodgrain, even peeling paint can make great textures!

• In the Menu Bar to to Filter> Texture> Texturizer.
• When the dialog window opens up, look for the right-facing arrow in a circle next to the Texture pull-down and click on it, then choose Load Texture.
• Navigate to where you have a .psd image you want to use as a texture. (You can prepare these by taking a .jpg image, opening it in Photoshop or PSE and saving it as a .psd file.  I have a whole folder labeled Textures so I can find them when I want them.)
• Click on the image to choose it, then click Open.
  

• Your image will now appear as a texture!  The program uses the black and white values to create areas that look high and low to give the impression of texture, much like the bevel and emboss layer style does.

Experiment with images and settings, and soon you’ll have people touching your layouts too!

Notice the differing textures in this layout – one of my most touchable!

There are lots of sources for free texture images, just be careful.  Many of them are for web use, and they’re very small images, so when you scale them up they get very ugly.

Here are some links to get you started!
http://www.amazingtextures.com/textures/index.php
http://mayang.com/textures/
http://www.photoshoptextures.com/

Do be sure to let us know how it goes!  Post a link here, or post in our gallery, and we’ll check it out.

Jenn

Quick Tip Tuesday: What’s that Tool?

When you dig into Photoshop and PSE, sometimes you come across tools that you really aren’t sure what to do with. The Type Mask tools are some of these, but actually, they’re very useful!

There are two Type Mask tools – the Horizontal Type Mask tool and the Vertical Type Mask tool. Just like the regular type tools you can use them to create type that goes sideways or up and down. But the cool part is that type is automatically used to create a selection! Why would you need that? I use it to cut titles out of papers, like this:

Step 1:
Choose the Horizontal Type Mask tool. It’s under the regular Type tool, just click on the Type tool and hold the mouse button down until you see the other tools revealed, then click on the one you want.

Step 2:
In the Options bar at the top, set your font and size (you may have to type a number in the type size box if you want it larger than 72 pixels).  Now type your text.  You’ll notice that the whole page goes red, don’t worry!  This is the mask:

Step 3: Click on the Move tool to get out of the type mode, and you’ll see that the red goes away and you now have a selection in the shape of your type!

Step 4: Press Ctrl C to copy and change to your layout, then press Ctrl V to paste, and you have your text made out of the paper!

So give it a try next time you want to cut some text out of paper, it’s fun and you’ll amaze your friends and impress your acquaintances. Tell them you learned it here!

Happy Scrapping!

Jenn

Quick Tip Tuesday – Easy Peasy Photo Mats

One of the most basic techniques that comes to digital scrapbooking from the paper-scrap world is matting photos.  With paper, it’s simple.  Glue your photo down onto some pretty paper, then cut the paper so that it shows a little beyond the edges of the photo.

In the digi-world, it’s not hard to do either!

Here’s a quick and easy way to put mats under your photos – the digital way:

Step 1: Pick out a background paper and a photo. Drag the photo onto the paper, making sure that there’s room all around it for the mat.

Step 2: Pick out the paper you want to use for the mat, and open it.

Step 3: Choose the Move tool, and hold down the SHIFT key.  Now click and drag the mat paper onto the background paper.  Holding the SHIFT key will make the mat paper land exactly in the center of the background paper, covering the whole thing. If you can’t see your photo at this point, hold the CTRL key and press the [ key until the mat paper is on the layer below your photo).

Step 4: Choose the Marquee tool, making sure you have the Rectangular Marquee tool.  (If the Elliptical tool is showing, click on it and hold the mouse button down until you see the Rectangular Marquee tool, then click on it to Choose it.)  Click and drag a selection around the photo, leaving as much space as you like around the photo.

Right-click inside the selection, and choose Select Inverse.

Press Delete, and the rest of the paper except for the part right under and immediately around the photo will disappear!

Step 5: To keep the mat under the photo as you move it around, you want to link the mat layer and the photo layer.  To do this, hold the CTRL key down and click on both layers in the layers panel to make them both active (they will highlight).  Now click on the Link Layers symbol at the bottom (or top if you have PSE) of the layers panel– it looks like a little chain.

When you do this, it’ll put a chain symbol on both layers, showing you they are linked.  If you move one layer, the other will move too!  To unlink them, just click on one of the layers to make it active and click on the Link Layers symbol again.

You can repeat this process as many times as you want!  It’s quick, easy, and you don’t have to try to guess how large to ‘cut out’ your paper, or stretch it to fit after the fact!

Happy Scrapping!
Jenn

Foto Friday – Missing the View(finder)

As you may remember, our camera went into Mouse Creek (courtesy of the 14 year old).  At least she was trying to get a good shot, and just slipped on a rock.  She never got the shot, though all the pics on the card survived.  I took the camera apart and dried it out, put it back together, and it turned on!  But when I went to take a picture, the lens jammed and it’s hopeless.  Either the gears got knocked out of whack, or there’s a bit of grit in there jamming  them.  I tried to free them manually, but the lens motor is inaccessible in this model, so I couldn’t free it.

So now we’re in the market for a new point and shoot!  We don’t want to lug the big camera on vacation, so we thought we’d go look around.  We’ve done a lot of research online, looking at sites like snapsort.com so we had an idea what we wanted:

• small but not too small
• good quality lens
• the special settings we use: macro, sports, self-timer
• good optical zoom
• decent sensor
• view finder

We’ve had good luck with Canons before, so that was where we started looking.  We learned 2 very interesting things:

• you can’t buy a point and shoot camera with a view finder.  Period.  Which is too bad.  I know that was sacrificed for space and cost, but it’s really very useful.  Using the viewfinder when you have it helps stabilize the camera for better photos, and often the screens are hard to see in the sun.  Not to mention using the screen sucks battery life.
• they don’t include a camera card!  Not even a 512MB card!  Used to be you got a small card with it, but no longer.  So we shelled out $14 for a 4 Gig card, which ought to hold us.

We ended up getting a Canon A495 point and shoot camera.  And it’s BLUE    It has a 10 megapixel sensor which is a little better than trying to cram 12MP onto a sensor, but I’d have been happier with an 8MP one.  But I think this will do.

We’ve taken a few photos with it so far, and I’m pretty pleased with the results!

Just look how happy everyone is with their cannoli!

So now we’re all set for vacation, and won’t miss a moment of our adventures!

What camera do you use to take the casual, fun pictures?

Jenn

Quick Tip Tuesday – Help for Healers

One of the best things about Photoshop has always been the Clone tool.  We used the clone tool to fill in blank areas and extend photos, to retouch blemishes and creases in photos, and to smooth out wrinkles.

But the Clone tool was a little difficult – it created visible patterns or over-smoothed skin very easily unless you were very careful and skilled.  All the clone tool does is copies pixels from one place and pastes them down where you tell it to -  simple but not the best results.

So a while ago Photoshop started introducing the “Healing” tools.  These tools use some complicated mathematics to improve your results.  They do this by taking into account the texture, color and luminosity of the sampled area and merging it mathematically with the destination pixels.  This lets the program maintain the look of the original area without making it look artificially smooth.

Now we have three different options: the Clone tool, the Healing Brush tool and the Spot Healing Brush tool.  Today we’re going to try to help you understand which tool to use when, and why!

HOW THEY WORK

Clone Tool – as we said above: it simply copies pixels from one place and pastes them down where you tell it to put them.  You can adjust the opacity of the pixels you paste down, but that’s about it.  Press the Alt key and click on the spot where you want to grab the pixels from, then move the cursor over where you want to paste the pixels and click.  You need to use a soft (blurry edged) brush to better blend the pasted pixels into the existing photo.

Healing Brush – this works like the Clone Tool only in that you have to set the source for the healing.  Hold the Alt key and click on a spot that looks good, then move your cursor over a spot that needs fixing, and click (and drag if necessary).  This works amazingly for fixing wrinkles!  What the program is doing is looking at the pixels you sampled, then looking at the pixels you want to fix (the ones you click and dragged over) and making the new pixels match the old ones in terms of texture, color and luminosity.  This means you don’t get ‘super smooth’ skin, or the kind of patterns you can see with the clone tool.  You should use a hard edged brush with this tool, as the program spreads out 10-12 pixels and blends the edges.  The only time this will give you a problem is when you are working next to an area of contrasting color.  The program may pick up some of the other color and include it in the fixed pixels.  When you get into that situation, you’ll need to go back to the Clone Tool.

Spot Healing Brush – this works just like the Healing Brush, but without needing to hold the Alt key to take a sample.  The program looks at the area you clicked on, checks the pixels right around it, and replaces the area with pixels that match the surrounding pixels.  You will notice a black dot while it does the calculations, don’t worry, it will go away once it’s finished thinking.  This tool has the same problem as the Healing Brush – if you are too close to an area that is a lot lighter or darker – then it may sample that and include it in the results.  Again, you’re back to using the Clone tool to fix those things.  This includes if you have a spot that’s very close to another spot.

WHEN DO I USE WHICH TOOL?

Use the Spot Healing Brush:

• dust spots
• small blemishes

Use the Healing Brush:

• to smooth skin
• under eye bags
• wrinkles
• stains on clothing

Use the Clone Tool:

• to fill in blank area (such as copying grass or sky to make an image larger)
• when working on or near the edge between two contrasting areas.
• whenever you don’t like the results you get with the other two tools!

There are way more details on retouching photos with these tools, but we’ll have to save those for another post.  I hope this encourages you to try fixing up some photos with these wonderful healing tools!

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