Color Pop, Color Soft, Color Not

Check out my latest lot of photoshop actions to make your photos look great!

Color Pop – Give your photos a color boost with the click of a button. A fast and easy boost to your photo to really make it zing.

Color Soft – A lovely slightly colored effect, not quite monocrome, but not quite color. Perfect for softening distracting colors while maintaining some color in your photo. Great for heritage style layouts.

Color Not – Quick and easy monochrome images, no more fiddling to get the contrast right, with this action it happens in one easy step. Need more contrast? Run the action a second time for extra punch.

Grab them now in the DSP store!

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Doodly Frames and Some Arty Bits

I have two new products now available in store at DSP! These should be lots of fun to play with!

Check out my Doodle Me Crazy Frame Stamps, which also include photoshop brushes.

And now you can get ARTY with these fabulous brushes/stamps. Use them to artify your layout, do some fancy smancy brush work, or use them on masks.. the possibilities are endless!

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Experimenting with Overlays

A lot of scrappers seem hesitant to buy effect overlays because they can’t see themselves using them or are unsure of what to do with them. In this tutorial I thought I would give some quick and simple sample ideas of just how much you can do with overlays. For the purpose of this tutorial I am going to be using my Water Color Arsenal Overlays available in the DSP store. Here is the pdf version of the tutorial.

Firstly the important thing to remember with overlays is that in order to get maximum use out of them you need to be experimenting with blend modes. In Photoshop, you will find the various blend modes available to you in the Layers Palette.

For our first example I am going to use a photo. I know I often forget the interesting effects you can produce by using overlays on photos.

Here is the original photo of tulips and the second version, with Water Color Arsenal Overlay number 1 from the set, laid over the top and using the Linear Light Blend Mode.

 

As you can see, using the Linear Light blend mode, lightens the colours of the photo underneath in conjunction with the lighter colours in the overlays, and darkens the darker colours in the overlay and colours underneath giving an interesting water colour wash effect. In the following sample, I have laid two different water colour overlays on a paper from my Sea Biscuit Page Kit available in the DSP store.

On this sample I used the Colour Burn blend mode on both Overlay layers. Colour burn tends to give a wet saturated look on lighter colours making the paper in this case almost look like wet fabric. Overlay Blend Mode will produce a softer effect to Linear Light. On the Paper below from my P365 Essentials Vol 2 Page Kit I have used the water colour overlay over the top of the paper using an Overlay Blend Mode.

The effect can be adjusted by reducing the opacity of the layer.

You can also experiment with blend modes to age your photos. The photo below is a monochrome image of my daughter taken a few years ago. Adding a water colour overlay with a Hard Light Blend Mode and 61% Opacity gives the photo an aged look. This effect works best on dark monochrome photos. You could get similar effects with different blend modes on lighter photos.

Here is the original photo and the photo with the Hard Light Blend Mode

You can enhance your special effects even further buy recolouring the overlays and using more than one overlay. There are so many possibilities available to you.

 

©Robyn Gough 2009 All Rights Reserved

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DSP’s Gold Coast Laptop Crop

I am back at my day job today after having a wonderful time at the Gold Coast for 4 days!

On Thursday I drove to Brisbane to pick up Margie, Allen, Lauren and Erica from the airport and take them to the Gold Coast.

Lauren very kindly uploaded this photo without photoshopping me first! I can’t believe how much weight I have gained on the cortisone! Scary!

 It was absolutely wonderful to be able to meet my online work mates in person and get to know them in real life rather than just online.

Once we finally got to the Gold Coast we checked in and went in search of some lunch. We went to Billy Baxters on Caville Ave. We headed back to the hotel afterwards to settle into our rooms and then afterwards enjoyed a wonderful Buffett meal in the Hotel Restaurant.

On Thursday afternoon we had a wonderful time on the pre-crop Photo Walk. It was soo much fun getting to meet so many DSP members in the flesh all at once.

I took a few pics on the photo walk, I think I took more pics of the DSP’ers than I did of the scenery!

Here are a few of the photos I took on the walk.

 

Here are some picks from the Laptop Crop itself.

We had lots of fun scrapping and getting to know each other a little better and helping each other learn more about our craft! There was even a bit of line dancing involved, or should we say digidancing?? There were lots of prizes to be had with one lucky winner winning the Wacom Bamboo Fun Graphics Tablet!

I think the Wacom rep did quite well selling lots of tablets! I was a little naughty and couldn’t resist the wonderful deal he was offering and bought an Intuos 4! I can’t wait till it arrives!

I will have some more exciting news to share, but for now my lips are sealed.. stay posted and you will find out in good time.

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Cross Processing Graphically Challenged

The March Graphically Challenged at DSP is to 'cross process' a photo and create a layout with that photo. Cross processing is a traditional still film photography technique that can produce some really striking results, however you can achieve similar effects in photoshop without messing with those stinky chemicals! I have done a tutorial to demonstrate how to achieve the effect in photoshop. The challenge is to create a layout using the cross processed photo and have it take up the entire page. I decided to scraplift a layout done by Klamb1111 because I loved the affect she created on her layout with the tutorial and had the perfect photo to use after Jasmine learnt how to ride her bike without training wheels over the weekend! Anyway, here is my layout using the technique, using the cross processed photo, blend modes and a background paper from my Altered Heart Page Kit.

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