digital collages

One of my (loosely set) goals for next year is to get pretty darn good in Photoshop, altho I'm switching over to Elements 11. Photoshop is too darn expensive and like most really complex programs, I'll use about 20% of it. By playing with a trial version of PS CS6 and Elements 11, I've convinced myself that Elements will work just fine for me. It also has some cool home-user type stuff that looks like fun. Luckily most of the doodads and commands are very similar if not the same, so it shouldn't take me too long to get at least back to the level I was at in PS CS2, the ancient version of Photoshop that I've been using for the past several years.

A marvelous place for all things digital is Scrapbook Graphics. I forget how I first found them but they have a great line up of designers (altho I mostly buy from just a few whose work really appeals to me) and an active online community with monthly challenges, contests, classes, tutorials, etc, that I'm participating in more and more.

One of the challenges for December is in the section they call the Launch Zone and this month the challenge was to use the provided template (first image). I'd never used a template before and didn't have much of a clue what to do, so I printed off the tutorial they linked to, opened up the trial version of PS CS6 that I'd just downloaded and went to work.

Talk about a learning curve... new program, new technique. Oy. Made my head hurt. But I fired up the Keurig, made a hazelnut cappuccino, and struggled thru the first twenty minutes until things began to make sense enough for me to move right along.

So the 2nd image was made in PS CS6. The photo is my great grandpa around 1895, dressed up like the town dandy, posing in a photo studio.

I made the 3rd image in Elements 11 using the same template. I figured doing the same exact task in both programs would go a long way to reassure me that I could do just fine with Elements and save the PS CS6 money for something else, and it did. I left most of the template elements intact because I wanted to see the program difference between the two pages when I was done and not be distracted by different elements. I like them both altho the colors in the blue one appeal to me more.

credits: template - Rosey Posey, flying bee - Lorie Davison Quieter Than Daylight kit, all other elements - AJC12 and AJC13 by Tangie

dandelion goes b/w

Kim Klassen is having a texture... challenge, I guess, altho she isn't calling it that. You just need to use one or more of her many free textures on a flower photo. It starts tomorrow and I assume she'll post a way to link a blog post, so I'm getting ready now.

I started out with a dandelion image I took a few summers ago, in our front yard. Cropped it more or less square, then duplicated it. I began dragging Kim's various filters onto it, playing with the opacity and fill percentages. (Honestly, I don't even know the diff between those two things, I just adjust till I like the look. I really must learn more about PS.)

I settled on one called luminous - darker around the edges with some just barely visible text. Changed the duplicate layer to multiply mode. Played with levels until I had the white tufts positively glowing, made it a little more contrasty. I liked it well enough but it wasn't really blowing my skirt up, to borrow a Pioneer Womanism. 

Then I had the brilliant idea to desaturate it. That did the trick. Gave it a vintage look, like a faded old picture you might find tucked in the pages of a book, forgotten on some long ago summer's day.