Design House Digital

Posts Tagged ‘Photoshop Elements’

Saving Your Layout for the Web

Hi all! Decorator Shannon here with a quick tutorial on how to save your layout for the web. I’ve seen questions on the forums about how people get their layouts to look so crisp and sharp in the galleries. The answer is a quick series of steps after you’ve saved your layout.

These instructions are for Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop Elements 6. If you have a different version the menu options just may be slightly different than what I list.

First, you want to open your full size (12×12 or 8×8) .jpg file of your layout.

Next, you will resize your layout. In CS you do this by image>image size. In PSE it’s image>resize>image size. The dimensions will be 600×600 pixels and 72ppi. Change the pixels/inch first and the size second.

Next, you will sharpen your image. This is what makes it really pop on the web, instead of having that slightly fuzzy look. You’ll do this by applying an unsharp mask to the entire image. In CS you’ll find this in filter>sharpen>unsharp mask. In PSE you’ll find it in enhance>unsharp mask. My settings are as follows; amount: 150, radius: 0.3, threshold: 0. You could play around with it a bit if this doesn’t look quite right to you.

Now you will save your new file. Make sure you choose “save as” and not “save”, you don’t want to overwrite your full size file. I always save my file with the same name as my original, but I add the word “small” to the end.

There you have it! A few easy steps to really make your layouts pop when they’re uploaded to the web. I’ll end with a visual of how my layout looks before and after resizing and using the unsharp mask.

Before:

After:

Tutorial: How to use the Selective Color Tool in Photoshop

Hello, Hello! Karla here and I’m going show you all how you can tweak your colors in Photoshop using the Selective Color Tool! I use it ALL the time to make the colors on my photos pop or change the color entirely. You can even use it on your scrapbook supplies and papers! Let me show you how using Photoshop or Elements.

Here is an original photograph of some pot tops…or something lol…

Now this looks pretty cool like this but I thought the colors could use some punch. But I only wanted to change the red and teal plates for this example. The selective Tool is perfect for this because it’s an easy way to target select colors. To use it your going to go to IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > SELECTIVE COLOR

Then your going play with the settings. 

I decided to change the red and blue pot tops. Since the blue color of the tops looks kind of teal-ish; the Cyan option worked better then the Blue. To pick what color family you want to change you just pull down the COLOR tab. I wouldn’t worry about the custom tab. I then got this result

So then it was ready to scap ^_^ I used this technique on all the photos in the layout below.

[ kits used: Fly Girl, Digi Essentials (stitches), Digi Essentials 5 (letter brushes) and Digi Essentials 7 (Metal Brads), Page template from Tiffany Tillman ]

Some things to note:

  • To get reds more red, I start by selecting the red color from the color pull down menu. The next step I do is lower the CYAN percentage. Anytime you want to pump up or down your reds, the Cyan % does it beautifully! And as you can see from my example I tweaked some of the other settings as well.
  • The blue color of the tops looks kind of teal-ish; the Cyan option worked better then the Blue. If you have ‘blues’ in your photo that you want to change then try both the Cyan and Blue percentages to see which ones work best for that image. Or use both ^_^

Using the Select Color Tool is not just for our photos. We can use it on our digi stash! Let’s say you love a paper but wished the flowers were pink instead of orange or that a particular shade of blue just wasn’t ‘blue’ enough for ya; using the Selective Color Tool can help in a lot of those situations! I’m going to show you an example using some papers from my Felis kit.

We’ll start out with the small square or the original pink and kraft

I’m want it to be purple and kraft. So I played with the settings like so.

I put all dials to 100% in the red pull down then…

In the Magenta option I set all the dials to 100% accept the yellow, that I set to -100%

Now my paper is purple and kraft. Or how about a pale green?

Dude…this tool is super neat-o and so simple to use! BUT….there are times when you want to change a specific color and you can’t really get it to look right because not matter what you do it changes other things as well. For example. Take a look at this paper from the same Felis kit. Here is piece of the the original paper.

Now let’s say I wanted to change the orange leaves green and leave everything else as-is. I run into the problem of changing ‘like’ colors.

When I turned the orange leaves to the green color I was looking for it also changes the pink design in some of the leaves to purple. This happens sometimes. Not a lot but it does happen. It seems to acure in more complex designs. But yeah, play with the settings and have fun pumping up those colors and changing your favorite papers to suit your needs! It’s really cool and I must say; the Selective Color Tool has become one of my favorite Photoshop tools!

I hope to see you tonight in the chat room! My chat starts @ 9pm EST! YAY!

Enjoy and until next time, Happy Scrappin’!




Tutorial: Simple tips for beginning photo editing part: 1

Learning to digital scrapbook can be a daunting task when you first start out AND so can photo editing.  I cannot tell you how happy I was to just learn these simple skills in Photoshop Elements and what a huge difference they made in my digital scrapbooking layouts.

Lightening Photos: When your photo is underexposed, your falsh didn’t go off, or the flash was simple not enough light.

1.  Open a photo in PSE.

2.  Always make a copy of your original layer before modifying it. Then if you don’t like the way it’s turned out you can discard it and easily start again on another copy of the original. To create a new empty layer, click on the New Layer icon at the top left of the layers palette. A new layer will appear immediately above the layer you currently have active.

2. Go to Enhance> Adjust Lighting> Levels.

3. Your levels box will pop up. Click on the third little eyedropper all the way to the right (set white point)

4. Click on any portion of your photo that is white, or the lightest area you can find in your photo.

5. Your photo will now be brighter than the original–simple as that!

6. If you don’t like the changes to your photo you can always undo them and keep playing around with the lighting until you get the perfect look. Just press reset in the levels pop up box.  You can change the lighting by clicking on different white parts of your photo with the eye dropper.

Warming Photos: Used when the flash or other lighting washed out the colors or you just want to add a little warmth to the photo.

1. Open a photo in PSE.  Duplicate photo by going to Layer> Duplicate Layer> OK this will make a background copy.

2. Click on the “Create Adjustment Layer” icon that looks like a black and white circle next to the New Layer icon at the top of your Layers palette.

3. Choose “Photo Filter”

4. Be sure that you have the “Preview” option enabled by clicking the box, this will allow you to view the intensity as you increase/decrease the warmth.  Change the warmth by dragging the Density slide to the left or right inside the Photo filter pop up box.  You can also select the “warmth tone”  by changing the color box by clicking on it.  Nice colors to try when looking for warmth are yellow, orange, pinks, and reds.

5. The results: A warm sunny day!  I wanted to take the cool tones and bring some warmth into the photo. It was a really warm day, but my camera did not capture that, a few simple steps and it’s perfect!


Just a few reminders:

1. Work with a copy of your photo and be sure to save the edited photo under a different name in case you want to go back to the orginal .

2. Moderation in all things.  The slight, simple changes you make in photo editing are going to have the greatest overall impact and will keep your photos looking natural and “real”.

3. Have fun, the more you play around in Photoshop Elements the more comfortable you’ll feel.  Your photos and layouts will thank you!

Use your Cell Phone Camera for Scrapbooking – Choose your Digital Camera

Do you ever end up in a place where you wish you had your camera?  Maybe you have a camera, and just didn’t realize it!  Does your cell phone have a built-in camera?  If so, you don’t have to miss out on that great photo opportunity!

Take the Shot

If you don’t have your regular camera nearby, don’t be afraid to pull out your cell phone and take that shot.

On my birthday, my husband and I went to one of our favorite restaurants, Tucanos in Salt Lake City.  I didn’t bring my camera, but instead I pulled out my iPhone and asked the waitress to take a shot of us together.  It was a good photo of me, and those are rare, so I was really glad we did that!

Mary's Birthday Photo

Mary's Birthday Photo

Get your Photo off your Cell Phone

Of course, if you have a high-performance phone like an iPhone or a BlackBerry, you can get those photos off your phone when you sync with your computer.

The easiest way to get one photo off your phone is to email it to yourself.  To do this, you’ll need to be sure you have a data plan with your camera.  Just browse to your photo, and look for “tools” or “options” icon or link.

If you don’t have a data plan but can send your photo over text messaging, “text it” to someone whose cell phone has a data plan, and ask them to email it to you.

Email your Cell Phone Photo

Email your Cell Phone Photo

Touch Up your Photo

Cell phone photos are not going to come out like a professional-level DSLR photo will come out.

It will most likely have a resolution of 72ppi (pixels per inch), so if you go to print out a 4″x6″ at a resolution of 300ppi your photo won’t be as clear as you will like.  Also, your cell phone will often focus on the wrong object in your photo and get the lighting a little bit wrong.

So you’ll want to touch up your photos in an editor such as Picasa, Photoshop, or Photoshop Elements.  For the photo below, I went into  Photoshop and used Images > Adjustments > Curves and then Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.

Unsharp mask does a lot to sharpen up a photo that was taken on a cell phone.

Mary's Birthday Photo (touched up)

Mary's Birthday Photo (touched up)

Use your Photo in your Layouts

Now that you have your cell phone camera on your computer and touched up, you can use them in your layouts and share them with your friends and family!

To be completely honest, I did the layout below at 72 ppi because I don’t plan on printing it out.  I’m sure it would be fine if I print it out, though maybe a bit fuzzy.

Mary's Birthday Layout

Mary's Birthday Layout

It’s my hope that this little post helps you feel empowered to take photos using your cell phone when you don’t have your camera with you.  It’s great to not lose out on recording those memories.

This is the second in a series.

1 Kit, 4 Ways – Lefty Righty Template Five

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Another week, another fabulous template! Here at DHD, we love the ease that a template gives you! We’re using Tiffany Tillman’s Lefty Righty Template Five as the base for all of our layouts this week:

This two page spread has six photo blocks, a bracket mask, and room for your title and journaling, with plenty of room to spare! Let’s take a look at what we did with it!

SoManyReasons-copy

While I loved many of the design aspects, I don’t do two page layouts very often. Instead of just sticking with one page of the template (and only having half of the bracket), I opened the entire thing, and cropped out a 12×12 portion that I liked. I created my own bracket, using papers from Deena Rutter’s Scarborough Fair – Trinket line, and tilted my photos slightly for a more casual look. I also moved around the ribbon and paper strips to add room for my title, which is one of Carina Gardner’s Daisy Jane Paper Bits. Stitching and a rhinestone border from Audrey Neal’s Butterfly Fancy Elements finished off my page perfectly, about Reason No. 57 that I love my daughter.

web7-18-07-Eliza-Grace-Doub

Theresa Marie Goon kept it at two pages, which is just what she needed to document the recent birth of her sweet baby girl! She says: “I loved how many photos could be placed on this template without having to add any on my own, and I also liked how the photos were placed, as it made your eye start at the top left and gradually go down to the bottom right corner. I didn’t modify a whole lot, but I tilted the photos to give it more of a fun look rather than traditional. I also took the bottom strip off and put in the scalloped edge paper instead (using Kate Teague’s Softness kit), moved the title and journaling, and added little bits of journaling (Carina’s Design 365-Journaling) around the layout.”

2010 03_Brenna bloom small

Karen Funk says this: “I prefer to do 1-page layouts, so I resized the template to fit on single page. I used solid colors for the small squares to keep it from looking to busy, but layered a few background papers (from Jen Allyson’s Design 365 June kit) for just a little more interest. I used a brush along the edges of the squares to try to create a chipboard effect, and added a white stroke around the word Bloom (Deena’s A Kind Word vol 2) to create a sticker.” I love how Karen used some of the photo blocks for paper, instead, and how the layout is full of texture and color, with plenty of white space left over!

2007-Family-photoshoot

An 81/2 x 11 scrapper, Renee Fink didn’t let the 12×12 size of the template hold her up! She says: “I resized this layout to 8.5″ x 11″. I changed 2 of the photos to landscape orientation and then added a photo on the bottom right hand page. I shifted the bracket mat over to the left a bit so it wasn’t centered on the page. Because I resized this layout I felt like there was awkward blank space on the left edge so I went to work with the brushes from Jen Allyson’s Vanity Fair Aubergine kit and it gave me the direction for the theme and focus of this page.” It also left her plenty of room for her handwritten title, from Deena’s A Kind Word vol 3, which looks like it was made to fit there!

So, what do you think? Ready to create? Do you want a Lefty Righty Template Five to call your very own? Tell me one reason YOU love Design House Digital, and you’ll be entered into a random drawing. Can’t wait until next week? Tiffany’s our Featured Designer this weekend, so be sure and check back then for a freebie and great discounts on all of her fabulous templates!

(Congrats to LinaH, who will be creating with Kate’s Life: May Extras for commenting last week. I bet she loves us now, huh?)

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