Easy Text Effects

When you experiment with Photoshop enough, you can learn how to grundge or distress edges. You can even learn how to make torn paper. If you are a scrapbooker, just think, anything you can do with tangible scrapbook supplies, you can do with digital scrapbook supplies. The easiest way to get these effects is to purchase actions (.ATN files) which will do all the steps for you with one press of a button.

make your text look--- Make your text look

like a block------------- like it was stamped.


make your text look ---Add inked edges

like chipped paint------

Get the look of torn paper.

My favorites is the chipboard effect and inked edges. Go to Atomic Cupcake.com and you can purchase or download some of their free actions. They also have a section that gives great PS Tutorials for beginners. Check them out.

To learn how to install actions, see the below link.

http://saturn-rings.deviantart.com/art/Install-Photoshop-Actions-91683217

Photography into Art and Wallpaper

If you are an HGTV junkie like me, you see that a lot of designers will use photography as art for the wall. Check out http://www.betterwallpaper.co.uk/default.aspx. You can send them a photo and they will turn it into wallpaper. Since my house isn't huge, I had Ritz camera enlarge a photo into a 20 x 26, changed it to sepia and photoshopped a little border. Put it in a frame and hung it over my mantle.

Ryan takes great pics of flowers, and I hated having them just stuffed in an album, so I framed them and put them on shelves in Kennedee's room when she was born.

Spell with Flickr

This is so cool. Go to http://metaatem.net/words/ and you can type in any word and it will pull up photos of letters to spell the word you chose. If you have ever seen those really expensive framed pictures that take your last name with cool letter photos like these and then they matte it into a frame and sell it for like $50++++++++.

Now all you have to do is choose your word, right click on each letter and save it. Upload it to your favorite photo developer and frame it yourself. Tip: on the "spell with flickr" website if you left click on the letters, it will give you several different photos to choose from for each letter.

Again a different action applied that I call "H_D_A" from devianart.com. and then I increased both brightness and the contrast with a soft brush selected around K.

actions into action

Here is a before and after of some pics in Malibu. The first I used an action by "night light"(set 66). To better explain. To give a picture this type of effect you would have to perform several steps with different tools (in other words there are different layers that have been added to the original background from contrast, lighting, color, opacity, blurs and other filters. An action is when somebody creats an .ATN file that puts all the steps in order. Once you download the action or .ATN file, you just have to click one button and it performs all the steps really fast for you. The only other thing I did,was I added a linear gradient using the colore black and directed it from each corner to her face. That is why the edges are darker (burned) and it gradually gets lighter in the center.



This second photo has been cropped, partially blurred with two different actions applied including "night light" (set 67). I then made a masked selection around Kennedee with a soft brush and increased the brightness and then used the burn and dodge tools for final touches.

No action applied here, I justed did a mask selection around kennedee and did a blur filter.

Computer Smarts? Here is a start

1 year ago, I felt pretty computer illiterate. It's amazing how much you can learn in a year. If your looking for a good digital scrapbooking how-to book, you must use thedigitalscrapbookteacher.com. You can purchase your book there and it is worth every penny. I bought another basic Photoshop elements book and it didn't give me as much in-depth info. She also gives you tons of freebies from papers to frames, buttons, etc.
However her book is for PSE 5. I have PSE 6.0, so some of her instructions didn't work with my system and this is where I really had to learn my computer. I can now download, unzip, and install anything from brushes (which are like stamps) and actions. I HEART actions. Check out atomic cupcake for some great actions and their are also some freebies at www.deviantart.com

Photo Book for Ryan for Christmas

For Christmas I made a photobook for Ryan using blurb.com. I took some of my favorite photographs that he has taken and digitally scrapbooked them in Photoshop Elements with different tools, papers, and embelishments from online digital scrapbook stores. They published it in a beautifully put together book with a personalized dust jacket. Here is a slide show of some of the pages. He said this was the best present I ever gave him.