Shoppe Tips and Tricks

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Hi all, Trish here with my first blog post on the Shabby Shoppe blog! I’m here to give you some tips on something that can really frustrate us scrappers at times… matching kits and pictures. Now I’m not going to tell you how to buy a kit to match what you need, but how to match your pictures to a kit.

So, if you’re like me you probably do some spontaneous kit buying. I tend to use the excuse “Well, I’m pretty sure I have something that will match this, or I will at some point have something that matches.” (lol) But I’m all about some instant gratification, comes with having  a low  attention span and little patience, so I’m  not good at waiting to use a kit. I’ll set myself up to start scrapping, and start going through my pictures to find at least a match to the kit theme, or most often, a picture I just WANT to scrap. Then, I’ll get frustrated. I’ll see a picture I just have to use, but… the colors just won’t do at all. I could just switch the picture to monochromatic, but where’s the fun in that? I live to make easy things more difficult for myself, and I rarely feel monochromatic. (lol) So instead I’ll have me a little picture editing fun. (I do so love editing pictures!)

What I’m going to give you tips on is using some pretty easy tricks on making those photos match. I’m wanting to use Shabby Princess’ beautiful Clementine and the following picture of my Belly Pie.

As you can see, they don’t really match each other all that well.

What I’m going to cover is using gradient maps and blending modes to make those pictures match.
First edit your picture so that it looks the way you want it (as in fixing lighting, blemishes, sharpness, etc) then DUPLICATE it. Just completely forget that bottom layer from now on. This is so important so that when you do further editing you don’t have to completely start over if you mess up. Unless you’ve already built your page, open the kits preview, then use your color picker to select the two colors that are either the most prominent or that you think you’ll be working the most with. I’m selecting the tan and red from the kit to work with it.


Go back to your picture then go to Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Gradient Map. (NOTE not the Fill Layer>Gradient these are two different things!) It might look right the first time you do it. What it does is create a gradient map out of the two colors you have selected and it might have the wrong color prominent. See when I fist clicked it, it looked like this:

I didn’t want red the prominent color so I clicked the gradient and went into the gradient editor and switched the colors around. It now looks like this:

Still a little funky but we aren’t done yet so don’t fret.

Make sure the gradient map layer is selected then go to your blending modes (it’s the drop down panel that should be saying Normal right now). The first one I tried out is soft light. It already helped the picture match the tones of the kit more, but it’s still not quite what I want.

I’ve found it helps a lot to also create a (lol) monochromatic layer. (We won’t leave it too noticeable though. lol) Again go to Layer>Adjustment Layer only this time select Black and White. When the menu block pops up click ok and it takes you to the Black and White menu box. Adjust it to the way you feel looks best then (optional really) click the tint box. Click the little color square and then go over to where you have your two colors selected. Click on the color you want prominent (mine’s tan) and then lower the saturation so that the color is just noticeable.

Select your black and white adjustment layer in your layers and again play with your blending modes and opacity until you get a look you want. Unfortunately I can’t just tell you what to use, because its generally going to vary from picture to picture. I can tell you I used overlay at 25%.

This isn’t a step you’ll have to do each time, but if you’re using a shabby/worn kit you also might want to go to Layer>Adjustment Layer>Hue/Saturation and lower the saturation just a tad to give the picture a slightly older worn look. Here’s the final picture I’ll use:

Here are two examples. They show the same layout with the same picture, only the one picture has the edit I did above, customizing it exactly to the kit.

See the difference? While the first one does look good, the second looks so much better because the tone of the colors in the picture matches the kit so much more. It has the same tan tint most of the kit has, and the same worn quality. While you could be happy with a good page, wouldn’t you rather have an even better page?

Well, I hope you all enjoyed this and found it helpful in your scrapping.  Be sure to come back tomorrow to check out a fun new thing we’re starting on the blog!

TrishTips and Tricks, Uncategorized 7 Comments