Ithought this tutorial was pretty cool.

It goes into a lot of different techniques in just a little bit of space. 

Scrappers might find some interesting tidbits and ideas in here - everything from making a piece of tape to creating a Polaroid look to scratching text into a wood texture.

Click the image to link to the tutorial, or just follow this link.

 

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I’ve been using these styles for some time now - they are set up for the Layer Fill option available in Photoshop (and recognized in Elements).

They’re set up for 10% increments with two more special fill opacities for 25% & 75%.

Add-O-Matic them into Elements 5 or 6 and they’re ready to use from the Layer Styles palette.

    

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Somany folks have asked for the “Transform Selection” add-on for Handy Actions Lite that it really surprised me. I had no idea it was that popular an addition to Elements! Rather than make it a permanent upgrade to Handy Actions Lite, though, I decided to just make it an optional add-on for the folks who want it.

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PSE5Here’s the deal - if you have Photoshop Elements 5 and earlier, you should just download the stand-alone action here and manually install it (or, if you have Add-O-Matic for Elements 5, just run it through there). This will simply add the action for you (if you use Add-O-Matic, it will appear in the usual “Added Effects” category).

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PSE6If you have Photoshop Elements 6, however, I went ahead and made an installer for you. This will do all the work for you, including creating the required .xml file and placing a thumbnail for the action in the correct place.  If you already have Handy Actions Lite for Elements 6, this will even put the thumbnail right in the same Handy Actions Lite category in your Effects palette!

If you don’t have Handy Actions Lite for PSE 6, this will create a category place for it anyway in your Effects palette, along with the thumbnail.

Either way, installation is painless (and a good indication of how the other action packs install to PSE 6) and nearly instantaneous - so enjoy!

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If you really want to get a Christmas bonus, now through December 25 you can grab the Handy Actions Lite set for free - just use the coupon code

GrafMC07

when you get to checkout. Be sure to choose the correct version of Lite, though! The coupon is good for one version!

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Iwas playing around with some tutorials I’ve been saving for a free day, and found this one on making a denim background.

I don’t have the original link anymore, but I did make an action for it. Just drag it into your Add-O-Matic and you can make all the denim backgrounds you want.

I set this up for a 12″x12″ document at 150 dpi for scrappers. When the action completes, three layers will be selected. You can move these layers around with the Move tool and place them wherever you want. You might want to tweak the layer style drop shadow that goes along with them, though.

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Here’s a step-by-step of how I made my Snowy Stable image using Photoshop Elements 6:

 

The original image was posted as a challenge here, so that’s my starting image.

The first thing I wanted to do was make it an evening or nighttime image, so I simply created a solid color adjustment with a dark blue color and grouped it with the original:

I also wanted to pull down the saturation and brightness of the overall image, so I created a Hue/Saturation adjustment and pulled the saturation slider way down to the left. I also adjusted the Lightness, also pulling it to the left.

I created a new layer, reset my foreground and background colors by pressing <D> on my keyboard, and ran a Clouds filter (Filters>Render>Clouds). This, of course, covered everything up, so I turned off the visibility of this layer for a minute while I did the next step….

Next, the trees and sky had to go. The sky didn’t have much drama, and the trees seemed to distract a bit from the central focus - the stable. Isolating these things was pretty simply with the selection tools in PSE6 - just choose your favorite, and make the selection.

I turned the Clouds layer back on with my selection still active, and clicked it to make it the active layer.  I needed a mask to cover the sky area but reveal the stable, so I ran the Layer Mask-Reveal Selection action from Handy Actions. This instantly created my mask, revealing the clouds and hiding the areas I didn’t want them to cover up:

The clouds look a little - - not right - - though.  They have no perspective, and just seem to be plopped down on top (which they were, after all…!).  I want to give them perspective, but not mess up my mask.  Easy - simply turn off the link between the mask and the layer it’s masking. This allows you to Transform the clouds layer without affecting the mask, so what’s hidden and revealed stays hidden and revealed while you distort the layer contents - cool!

Click the clouds thumbnail and press <Ctrl>+<T> to open the Transform tool. Next, right-click somewhere inside the box on your image and select “Perspective” from the pop out menu.

Zoom way out and drag one of the top corner handles out until you reach the perspective you want.

I added another solid color adjustment layer to the top of my stack to give an overall bluish tint to the image.

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Nowfor some snow on the ground. It’s another simple technique. Choose the Magic Wand, make sure the “Add to selection” option is on in the toolbar at the top, reduce the tolerance to 20 ~ 25 or so, and make sure “contiguous” is ticked on. Now click a few places in the grass to make a rough selection. You don’t want to select all of the grass, just some areas where snow would have accumulated.

Create a new layer with this selection still active, and fill with White (Edit>Fill, or if your background color is still set at White, press <Alt>+<Backspace>). Blur it slightly with Gaussian Blur (Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur) at a setting of about 1.

There’s your snow cover:

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Finally, for the falling snow.  I simply ran the “Snow” action, from FunFotoFX and it was done for me!

As a final step, I used the “Line Frame” action from B&W Lab, and the image was complete:

 

 

 

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I’mgetting a few old photos out - ones that seemed impossibly horrible and beyond salvage - and running them through a few combinations of effects to see what happens. I’m getting some surprisingly nice images out of this pile of wasted electrons!

I’m mostly using effects from the B&W Lab collection, but I think I used one of the Glam Photo effects on this one, also.

This is the Golden Gate Bridge, taken through the fog from the exercise yard on Alcatraz Island:

I really like how it turned out. Very moody, dreamy, and distant. I can almost imagine being an inmate there and staring at that bridge for hours.

I’ve got a few more that are destined to be gifts, so I’ll post those later.

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Here’s a set of 7 Christmas cards ready to be downloaded and printed.  $5 gets you 7 card designs + smaller versions for gift tags, all ready to be printed, trimmed, folded and mailed.

These cards were all created in Photoshop Elements 6, and are sized to fit a 5″ x 7″ envelope when folded. Print resolution is 200dpi.

Recommendations for printing: Use a card stock (65#) with a gloss or semi-gloss coating. Trim carefully to size with a paper cutter, and fold carefully.

All sales of these cards from December 1, 2007 through December 21, 2007 will go directly to the Methodist Children’s Home. If you’d like to make an additional donation, or want to donate without buying these cards, please click over to their donation page.

The download is an Adobe PDF, so if you don’t already have it, you’ll need to download their free Acrobat Reader.

Spread the word about these in as many places as you can, please -
and Merry Christmas!

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