Digital Scrapbooking Freebies -Mommyscraps

Entries categorized as ‘photoshop tutorials’

Cardboard tutorial for Photoshop

April 20, 2008 · 20 Comments

I’m going to teach you how I made this cardboard.
cardboard tutorial
I’ll start by saying there are probably easier and other ways to do it, but since nobody else is sharing how to I started playing around to see if I could figure out how to make something that looked like corrugated cardboard. This is what I came up with and hope somebody else finds this useful.

Step 1. Make a new canvas (document) sized at 12 inches by 12 inches and 300 resolution (will also work fine at 200 resolution and I generally design at 200 resolution, but if you are designing professionally standards are 300 resolution). Set your foreground color to #856543 and your background color to #e2b379. Fill your background layer with your foreground color. Go to Filter > Sketch > Halftone Pattern. Choose line and then use the following settings size 12, contrast 19.

halftone pattern

Double click on your background layer to unlock it and then go to Edit > Transform > Rotate 90° CW to flip your stripes to vertical instead of horizontal. Your file should now look like this.

Step 2. Go to filter add noise and add 26% noise set to uniform and monochromatic.

add noise photoshop

Step 3. Go to filter > Unsharpen mask and set your unsharpen mask to Amount: 500 Radius: 250, Threshhold: 100

unsharpen mask

Your cardboard should now look like this.

Step 4. Go to filter > stylize > diffuse > Darken only repeat this 2 more times (for a total of 3 times)

diffuse phothoshop

Your cardboard should now look like this.

Step 5. Go to filter > texture> grain and switch to vertical with these settings intensity: 40, contrast: 0

Your cardboard should now look like this.

I could have stopped here, but I wanted to have a little more depth so added the following.

Step 6. Duplicate your layer and with the top layer go to emboss set it to the following Angle: -130, Height 15, Amount:500. Don’t worry about the blueish coloring, we’ll fix that in the next step.

Step 7. Desaturate your top layer and change the blending mode to soft light.

Step 8. Merge your two layers and your finished cardboard will look like this.

Here’s an example of what you can do with it. I find the cardboard looks best used underneath something.

Categories: photoshop tutorials
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Better black and white in photoshop tutorial

February 22, 2008 · 8 Comments

I am really big into photo enhancing and feel that your pictures should be the centerpiece of your digital scrapbook pages. I do not have the money for a really expensive camera so I usually enhance most of my photos. I am going to try and write a black & white tutorial for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop Elements, and Gimp. I am starting with Photoshop. I also wanted to add since I am self taught there may be some extra steps, but this is just how *I* do it and I like the results so thought I’d share. I realize not everybody needs screen shots for every step, but I like to include them for those who do.

Here is my starting picture. This was not the best picture to start with, but I figured that would be all the better for using this one.

Here is my ending picture.

A lot of you have probably learned to do black & white by either going to Image > Desaturate or switching to greyscale. Here’s what my photo would look like if I had used desaturate to make it black and white. No matter how I adjusted the levels it still looked drab.

Not very exciting. Okay, now on to my tutorial.

Step 1. I almost always use an unsharpen mask on my photos. Sometimes I don’t if it looks bad, but most of the time I do. To get to the Unsharpen mask go to Filters> Sharpen> Unsharpen Mask (screen shot below)

I normally set my unsharpen mask at Amount: 50, Radius: 5, Threshhold: 0. Sometimes I go higher and sometimes lower, but that’s a good place to start. There are a few pictures that I won’t use the unsharpen mask on, but not many.

Step 2. Switch to Lab Color. Go up to the top where it says Image > Mode and switch from RGB color to Lab color.

Next you want to go over to the channel palette. It’s right with the layer palette and you want to select the lightness channel.

Step 3. Adjust the levels on the lightness channel. With the lightness channel still selected go to Image > Adjust > Levels to adjust the levels on this channel. You will want to slide the sliders around the one to the far left I usually drag to the right and I’ll play around with the middle slider until I get where it looks right to me. I left my settings for this photo in the screen shots.

Step 4. Go to Select all > Copy with the lightness channel still selected and then paste it into a new document. Once it is in a new document switch the mode back to RGB (like you did above this time picking RGB instead of lab color Image > Mode > RGB color)

Step 5. Channel Mixer. Go to Image > Adjust > Channel Mixer. We are going to increase the green. You will want to tick the check box next to monochrome and then slide the green slider over to the right. I set mine anywhere from as little as 4 to as high as 24.

Step 6. My last step is to sharpen the photo. Go to Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen.

And here is the final results again.

Categories: photoshop tutorials
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