Inspire Me Monday: Digital Sentiment Manipulation

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Be sure to come back and read this OUTSTANDING tutorial on digital image and sentiment manipulation by the Bloom Brigade’s Tosha Leyendekker.... FILLED with information and step-by-step screen shots! xoxox, ~marcella

Hello creative peeps!!  Welcome to this week's Power Poppy Inspire Me Monday!!!  Tosh here, and I'm going to share with you how I manipulate digital sentiments, using Photoshop, to fit with the layouts I design with Power Poppy's incredible digital images.  For my first card, I used the new digital set Cherries and Berries.  

This is a long post, so I hope you bear with me.  I have a second card to share at the end too, in which I used a VERY NEW digital image called Merriest of Berries, along with the sentiment from Power Poppy's Hollyberries Digital set.

So, lets get right to it.  I Loved Marcella's new cherry clusters and thought it would be fun to combine both sentiments that come with the digital set Cherries and Berries.  So here's how I got started:

First, open all the images you want to use for your project.  I chose the cherries, and the two sentiments.  I then click on the middle yellow dot at the top left of the image, to bring them to the bottom of my screen and get them out of the way, leaving only the cherries on the board.

See that little pink eraser on the left?  Right click on the image and then click on the Magic Eraser Tool at the bottom of the pop-up screen.  Now, lets have some fun erasing!!  Just click on all the white space around your cherries that you want to be erased.  You'll need to click on the small areas too.  That way the only part that shows up when you create your design is the image itself.  No background noise.  Do this with each of your sentiments also.

Now, you're going to want to create the base for your image.  Start by clicking on File at the top, then "New", then "Blank File".

I want my card front to be a vertical rectangle so I'm making my base rectangular.  I chose 5" for my width, and 7" for my height.  My next card is square, so I just made the dimensions 5"x 5".  It's easier when getting ready to print it out.

I brought my image into the my blank base by clicking on the cherries at the bottom of the screen and dragging them into the frame.  Now, you can rotate, enlarge or shrink them by first clicking on the square arrows on the upper left hand side.  I've darkened the area by clicking on it and you can see a solid arrow pointing to it.

See the boxes around the image?  By hovering over one of them with your mouse, you can rotate it any direction.  You can also shrink or enlarge it.  I like to only use the corner boxes to shrink or enlarge because it doesn't distort the image.  Just hover over it until the arrows show, click and drag larger or smaller until you get the size you want.  I kept the cherries in their original size and just rotated and each time I wanted to add a cluster, I clicked on the cherries at the bottom of my screen and drug them up into the frame, and, once again, rotated them until I got the look I wanted.

There are times when you may want one image in front of the other, and it may automatically go behind.  That's easy to fix.  Just right-click on the image you want to manipulate and click "bring forward" or "send back".

Here's a look at my final cherry arrangement.  Once I was happy with how they were arranged, I moved on to the sentiments.  Now we're finally getting to what this tutorial is really about.  

I started by bringing up the first sentiment to the main screen by "double-clicking" the one I want.  I then made 4 duplicates by clicking on File at the top left, and then duplicate.  You're going to need 4 duplicates because you are going to be doing a lot of erasing.

Back to our eraser.  Right-Click on it and click on "eraser tool" at the top of the "drop-down" menu.  Next you will want to decide the size of your eraser.  We want to cover fairly large areas at a time, so I would suggest making the eraser a bit larger.  But small enough to fit in the tight areas.  If you are uncomfortable using a larger eraser in the smaller areas, you can always resize your eraser at any time.  Look at the top left of the screen.  See the brush stroke? Just go to the right of that and choose the size of the stroke you want.  Mine was set at 99 because I was erasing the entire bottom portion of the image, leaving only the word "You".

Then, using the highlighted crop tool on the left, crop your sentiment as close to the edge as possible.  It just makes it easier to lay out.

Do this with each panel of your sentiment.  Leaving only one section, or word, on each one.  I separated "You", "really are the", "sweetest" and "thing" so I needed 4 duplicates.  I then went on to do the same to the other sentiment.

It looks like this before you crop them.  Once again, I click on all the yellow dots, and take them off of my main screen so I just have my cherry base up.  Click and drag up each part of your sentiment one at a time. 

Now I can play around with each section of sentiment...enlarging, shrinking, rotating...whatever you want to do to fit your layout.  (use the square arrows, at the top left of the vertical strip, again) I enlarged the word "you", and shrunk some others.  I also rotated the word "with".  Just have some fun.

Once I get my sentiment layout the way I want it, I save it and insert it into a new Word document.  I can resize the entire panel there the way I want it.

That's finally it for the tutorial portion.  Here is a look at the final result once again.  I loved the look of the black/white with the bold red cherries standing out on their own, so I decided not to color the leaves or any of the sentiment.  Marcy does such an incredible job with her designs, that they are gorgeous even without coloring!

And here's a look at a card I made with the sentiment overlaid over the entire image.

I did everything the same as above, only I lightened the image first.

Click on "Enhance" at the top, scroll down to"Adjust Color", then to "Color Variations".  I made sure the "Midtone" button was highlighted on the left, and just clicked "lighter" about 6 times.  I then created a New Blank File, and drug the image up into it.  You can then lighten or darken it even more by clicking on "Adjust Color", then "Adjust Hue/Saturation.  Slide the "lightness" bar according to how saturated you want the image.

Erase the sentiment the same way you did before, and just lay it over the image any way you feel fits.

Here's a close-up:

Whew, that's it.  I hope I've explained it all clear enough, and that you get an opportunity to try manipulating some digital sentiments of your own.  Thanks for sticking with me!

  Happy Stamping!