Lessons

Lesson Info

3:15 pm - Constructing Cards Without Digi-Kits

All right, this one will be our last card that will develop it's a valentine card and let me just show you the end result so you can kind of see the different layers and how was constructed. This one has more layers and we have lamaze turn layers on enough. We're going to talk a little bit about, um, the adjustment layer again as well so you can change the difference. Texture looks and the's are you this whole card you can make on your own? So those of you who don't have any digits to get started, all you guys out there on the internet, you can actually create a card. It doesn't have to be a valentine's card, but you can use this template doesn't bother me none at all, and to create your car tonight kind of practice it because all of these elements are found in elements british of elements, so we're going to start out this is a five by seven as well were to start out by just opening it up a blank sheet of paper. We're not gonna have a digit kid or anything, so go file new blank file. W...

e are going to change it from pixels two inches and we're gonna go with a width of five and a height of seven and three, three hundred revolution keep the background is white and I've got my rulers up and running, and this is where we're going over to the graphics area and this is cool because you've got backgrounds here that you can use all different kinds of backgrounds, so I'm just gonna kind of slowly go through and see what kinds we have if you want your backgrounds to be a large thumbnail size, you just go into this little area on the right hand side, you pull up whatever site if you want to do small thumbnails, you could kind of seymour, but normally I just go ahead and have it at large so you can see it a little better flush to the medium so we can see those and we can oops can't scroll through because I'm kind of set in scroll through by taking this bar on the run right hand side, you see, you have only just pull some things out just so you can see we've got a birthday type of a background already made for you. You don't even have to purchase did tickets right off of that you can use anything from here we have sports, uh, background ahs well, there's a whole bunch of different backgrounds that you can create through that program um, so I'm not gonna pull it, ian right now I'm just going to show them to you I'm gonna pull in the background in the very at the very end how about that will work will work with all the other layers will have ah a plain background and at the very end just in case it does do that again I'll pull the background in so we're going to work with just the photos and we're going to create this layout but I showed you earlier see the tickets in this card's folder yeah right here and that pete, that piece is about I used a background from there so let's just kind of have them side by side because it's kind of fun to watch it grow and everything come into play so we have four photos and I always like to bring in the photos it doesn't really matter what you bring in first sometimes you were I do the background first and then bring my photos and then kind of visualize it so however you work best is it is totally up to you so I'm gonna go in I'm going to go file and I'm just gonna pull in this one I'm going to go ahead and do they're going to be kind of like square so I'm going to be holding my shift key down and I'm going to try some filters on this too just to kind of make it more fun but I think in the original layout I just used it as is so I'm going, teo either you can crop it here or you could just take your move tool and just move it on in to your layout now it's a little bit bigger than it would for what it needs to be but that's ok, we're going to go ahead into our filters. I'm gonna zoom in just a little bit. We're going to our filters and let's go into artistic and let's go into fresco that kind of gives it more of the rugged look in again, you can play around with these sliders to kind of see what's gonna work best for you going to go with a little bit of or detail maybe and then click on okay after we're finished, just click on the ok button and now you've got a nice little filter for that I'm gonna kind of make it a little bit smaller and push it off to the side and then bring in my next photo I'm gonna close out of that one goto file and open and I think I just use this one was his pull him into the and take my hand we could do it another way we could do the crop tool hold down the shift key so five different ways to bring this in go ahead and click on the check mark go ahead and take your move told drag it on in and let's just try another filter on this one maybe we use closing these out maybe we used the I like the sketch one sometimes with these so I'm gonna go into the graphic novel and that I'll go ahead and bring up this pop up box there's a couple different ones you can choose from now I can't run with this came into version eleven or version twelve graphic novel but I really do like this one it's kind of a funky look and I can zoom and if I need to so I can go get my zoom tool and zoom on end so I can see it a little bit better inside this program are inside this actual pop up box and I'm gonna go ahead and try that and again this is really important because this changes the whole look of it by using these little sliders inciting them one way or another and sometimes I go little increments at a time so I can see this is starting to get a little bit dark there so I need to push it back a little bit or maybe I want to go into the fine detail that one looks kind of cool let's just go with that one click on okay and then it will go in and bring it into my page okay so a couple different different filters let's go file on open let's bring in another photo from going with here get my crop tool hold down the shift key if you don't get it right perfectly the first time you can always nudge it by using your arrow keys and nudging it into place or you can take it and drag it from the inside of that and move it into place as well so if you don't get the crop right in the spot that you wanted teo just know that you can move it around if you need thio press the enter key to go on ahead and it here it to it and go ahead and bring it in and close that one up now we're never hurting the original so if we ever do something weird with this then we don't have to worry about we can always bring back that original now would be probably a good place to save it so let's go ahead and go file save and I always do file state as I'm just going to call this card one and I don't want it to be a pdf you had to kind of pay attention to what format it isthe I wanted to be a psd file so I'm gonna go ahead and save it as a psd file always think about that before you hit that say button because sometimes it all maybe it'll have the gift for the um or uh j peg or whatever and you kind of wanna work on that original psd file really contrition? There is an auto save feature on this, right or no, I believe you know what? I'm not positive on. Okay, do you want that switched off? Because if you're working in your original, you don't want to be saving over the original. You want to make sure to say that I don't have it set on it? I don't know. Check it out, though, because it would be interesting to know because it would be kind of scary though if you are working probably just go file save as is that psd right off the bat that's a really good thanks for that work flow tell. Yeah, definitely okay. And then I'm gonna go ahead in and bring in the other one. I'm probably not gonna mess with filters on that arm. Maybe we'll keep that one as is and then bring in the last photo trying drop close out and so we're kind of we're looking at our original on the left hand side and we're going to kind of try to make it look about the same with some filters in there, so I'm gonna bring this one over here. This one is a black and white, so I am going, I'm gonna do I'm gonna balance it out someone have a black and white down here, a color here and then this is going to be a black and white so we can create this is a black and white by going to enhance, and you could just convert it to black and white here, and you can kind of play around with the different adjustments and the different intensity levels and all that, um, sometimes one works better than the other again, you can zoom in, zoom out, I'm gonna probably go with the newspaper because it is a little bit lighter and then click on okay, so now we have ah, black and white to black and whites. Um, and then we have two colors. Now we can shrink thes down at the same time, so if we go into layers and we want to hold down our shift key and select more than one layer at a time, we can shrink them all down at once so it stays a little bit of time, so I'm going to shrink them all down because I had them all selected them. I click on the check more, and this is where maybe guides might come into play because you'll have everything lined up perfectly. So let's go into view in our grid, and this is actually a pretty good, good grid size, but if it wasn't, you could go into edit preferences. And general I usually just go into general and then over here on the left hand side that's where you see your guides and grids and then you could change you know, every four five or whatever you want to but I think this is gonna work pretty good because let's stay on public going to go in I'm going to go into two blocks over so but you can also change the color of the grid so if you're working on a red background and you have a red grid it's not gonna work so good so we can go in there and change it let's just go with a like a dark purple and then here's your guides you could change the guide color as well and then click on okay so I'm gonna have them come in two blocks over some kind of line them up over here they should snap to those guides there some snapping them and pull this one down here and I'm just gonna kind of bring them all in and then we can kind of cut them and do whatever we need to make him look really good. I'm just kind of really I shouldn't I should probably have waited tio reduce them in size because you really don't want to go back and forth um so workflow would be bring him in in a bigger size reduce them don't go back up again so all right, so we've got that looks pretty good but I am goingto probably cut a little bit out of this area here so I'm going to go back into the edit preferences general and I'm gonna go back teoh guy hey gris let's go and sound to four and see I mean, I might even do five I'm just looking down here you can see down here what it changes too thinking five looks pretty good for me to have like a five um sickness where can cut let me just go six and see what that looks like actually, you know what? I'm gonna go with six mike like six and then I can go in there and I can cut along those lines so I kind of just depends on how you look at this um we see here I want to go in the middle I do want to bring in a going to bring in a background first let's go with this let's bring it back or I'm gonna go one outside of those so it's one I hope you can see that. Yeah, you conceivable marching and there. So we have a block around that and I'm gonna put that on a separate layer it's going to go right above the background okay, so I have a layer right above the background it's below the other four and I'm just going to fill that with a dark um maroon color someone go in, I'm going to get my paint bucket tool and let's go up here bit go teo gonna fill it with a solid color and I'm not going to use this color here I'm going to use a maroon so I'm gonna click on the foreground color said it teo I'm gonna pull a color from over here this color right here it's really cool because sometimes if you want to have to lay out side by side do you want to pull in colors from another layout? You could have it open and then go back to that layout click on ok and now you have that color scheme as well gonna fill that hole entire area with that color I'm going to go ahead and do file and save and I want to turn off those currid so we can see it a little bit better now if you wanted to go in there you could start like making a little bit should probably do this just kind of by hand here you go ahead and cut a little strip out through here go to each layer hit the delete key and that's going to cut that piece out so that we can see a little thin strip there do a little thin strip here is well pull that on over, hit the delete key on each layer so that we kind of button it up a little bit. All right, so now we've got that part's done. Now we just we got photos in there, we have the filters with that and we're going to add the text, bring in some graphics. This right here is graphics, and this is also part of photoshopped element so you can bring those in from the graphics area and then with the very end, we're going to bring in the background how just a little bit gun shy about that background, so I'm waiting. Usually I have that background there, so I don't usually work this this way, but I think I'm gonna wait till the very end for that. All right? So we got that saved. We're all good there. I'm gonna go over and I'm going to mix up the text a little that we're going to use, you know, like, if you see this here it's got happy is really large typography skills are kind of fun if you have good typography skills. So you kind of pick whenever you're doing a layout. You want to make sure that, um, certain words stand out more than the others. So if you have a title or if you have if you want happy to stand out more of course you're going to make that a little bit bigger so we're going to make happy a little bit bigger and day a little bit bigger okay and I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna fill that hole entire background with a solid color so that we can work with a like color that we're gonna be putting back there anyway so that we kind of know I'm gonna go to that very background layer and I'm going to do something other than this color maybe I tio eh I'm a little bit lighter color there go to my pay packet tool and fill that again that's just a placer we will be pulling that background later and I'm going teo secure you you know what else I want to show you teo pull this text in I'm going to change this to have a white text color and we go to the top here make sure that I'm on that top of layers because the text is going to fall right above that layer so I'm gonna go to the very top layer and click one time and I'm just gonna type in happy and go ahead and check work make it a little bit larger this of course is not the font that I want to you so I'm gonna go back to my fonts selected and go scroll through it so I click inside of the font area and just use my little arrow keys to kind of go through the different fonts that we can pick from and once I find something that I kind of like and usually do something a little bit script e with this type of ah layout and of course if you want to you can click on this arrow that points down and you can cut on the right hand side you can see a little sample of what that fund's gonna look like so you can choose it before um and and know what you're gonna be choosing scroll down a little bit that's the one I think I used before so let's try something a little bit different just go with the regular brush script or should I go with cop cosmic sands what you making wasn't that your favorite job comic sounds good? Yes it's a nice I'll throw that in the third throw that in there just for you. All right? So we've got that I like to put the larger ones in first so I can kind of have a visual on how much room I have for the smaller tech so we're going to do happy and then maybe day is going to be in that same bond so I'm gonna go back and hear click down here and then a day since I'm working up with that thought, I'm just gonna go and throw that in there and go ahead and click on the check mark you get my text tool again and I can either, eh I can um I can go on with this and put valentine's but I like to do it on separate layers so I have a little bit more control on where I'm going to move it and then I can always do difference difference effects to different fonts teo are different text and fonts so I'm going to go ahead and do what we do here we did a a smaller valentine's but it has to be readable so it's going to go ahead and kind of keep along with that a little bit someone's going to click once hey and I'm gonna do a probably going to go with a sara font so it's gonna have a little bit of a thrill to it go with maybe um is there a times maybe just simple times new roman or something like that and two I think you can click inside a here and hit the tea I am there we go it will go directly to itself you know the name of your font it might be a little bit easier if you just click inside there and type the name real quick and then you can get that faster the faster the better okay and then I think I just had something kind of cute too down here sealed with a kiss um that we put down in the bottom make sure this is an example of having a little bit of a back glo because it didn't stand out so much on that so we went ahead and put a little bit of a back low on that particular font text go ahead and click once can't you see it's let's pull it down all right put that back in here and it is the same font that I used for valentine's are yeah valentine's so that's good cause we only have two different fonts one sarah from one sans serif some kind of sticking with what I'm what I was teaching before all right and then you could put the name of the person or whatever let's now start buttoning it up, pull it into place so I can take all of this if I know that all of this needs to move down a little bit I can click and drag around all of that it will select all of those layers and then I just hit that air ok to point to go down you could hold the shift key down if you wanted to go five increments at a time um in fact I might just do that I had it kind of center a little bit above center I think so go ahead with that and looking okay, but I think we can spice up the text just a little bit more so I'm gonna go ahead and save it right before I do ah major changes I usually go ahead into a safe maybe every five or ten minutes just depends on uh what you're what you need to dio and I'm gonna go up to the layer that is sealed with a kiss I think I'm just going to do a regular drop shut on this just to see how it looks so I'm gonna go into my effects go down to stiles go into my drop shadows and just a slight trap shadow I'm gonna do the same thing with the valentine's now again remember what I said as far as you can copy and paste that layer style as well. So I'm gonna undo that and just kind of reiterate that if you weren't here this morning you can go into layers same style that you put on sealed with a kiss can be put on valentine's you just right click and shoes copy layer style and then go to valentine's and right click and choose pace layer style all right now let's go ahead and check out happy I think I'm gonna put a stroke on this because we haven't really talked about that a whole lot I'm gonna go back into styles going two strokes I'm just gonna pick one real quick don't really like the color of that so I'm gonna go backto layers and then we can go into fx and that'll give us more options okay? So here's my stroke I can change the stroke color by clicking on the little right next to where it says p x click on that come in here I'm going to use the same color here for the stroke some clicking inside of that area click on okay and you can change the thickness of that as well don't want to go to think that's a little bit gaudy I'm just gonna have a light slight stroke on there all right I'm gonna go ahead and click on okay it's really weird and then I'm gonna click on double click actually wanna zoom back out go back and again I'm gonna do the copy and paste thing because I don't know what that's the thing I don't remember what stroke that was that it's easiest pie to go ahead and copy that style so that was from the happy layer so I go backto happy right click copy layer style and then go back to the day selected or go to the layer whichever is easiest right click and choose pace layer style ok, now it looks kind of boring because we don't have that fun background went we put that fund background in there it's going to come tonight tie it together but I do want to put a couple graphics in there too before we pull in that background somebody's going to go ahead and say that go back into my graphics area and go into graphics instead we have all these different kind of embellishments in here so uh I'm gonna have to kind of make a little bit bigger larger thumb now and in fact some of these air really nice but when you start looking at other people's digit kids the people who really do this for a living sometimes it makes these look and not as nice but some of them are are not so bad so I'm going to kind of look through here and see what might work with this kind of layout think I might have use this one but let me see if there's anything else this one might not be so bad we could kind of pull that and if we want teo I like to look at all my options another thing is that you can go in instead of by type you khun go into by activity or by color so if you are working with certain colors it'll kind of pull those together so or show off that you know exactly what you're going to be getting and how many different elements there are inside of this area but I do like to kind of narrow it down at least a little bit and let's just kind of look here my steve this one this one might be this one might work I think there was an envelope in here and sometimes when upgrades come along they don't carry over which I've noticed recently this piece right here let's just go ahead and throw that in there since I know okay yeah I don't know okay let's go ahead and get this one in there think it's because you see that little um blue little carrot in the upper right hand corner of that sometimes I can use those and sometimes I can't so I tried to pull out that the heart one with the blue and it said something about you have to be a member of adobe or something which I haven't had that happen for a while so I don't know why I said that but that's what it said with this last one so some of these that are earmarked blue if they don't come over it's possible that you have to be connected with the adobe side or something like that so I'm not going to pull those over it appears that one that was talking about the little heart envelope I'm gonna pull this in put that smack in the middle I think I'm gonna enlarge it just a little bit not a whole lot maybe have a read rotate it just a bit and then I can put a little drop shadow on there there was a question of color of the drop shadow it doesn't have to just be grea t contains the color right? Good question they're all smart up there let's change the color of this one although graves usually the default but we're going to go ahead in and answer that will quickly because that is a question all right so we gotta find that layer here's the layer now here's the thing this one is a smart object and it let us do it drop shadow let's just see what it does when we go in we may have to simplify it not sure so drop shadow here's the color that it normally goes to it's usually a grey or black so we're going to click on that and we can go in there and change it to whatever color you want if you wanna have a red reddish tint it changed to read I don't know if it looks that good but that's okay because now you can see all the different options today's today's day was more about kind of opening your minds to what can it d'oh and now we're tomorrow weren't in the next day day three we're gonna get into actually putting together some of these but yeah we have that you can change the depth of that so I'm just kind of pushing the distance a little bit change the opacity if you want it to be really really thick or are not thick but see through okay and click on okay down there there isn't okay button it's very little I don't know why it's not popping up but that's right double click on the hand told us to kind of pull us back um what was there was another embellishment I want to throw in there and then we're gonna try and shoot for that background see what happens crossing our fingers um what? This one right here did I pull that one in a rate I don't think I did unless that went to the background oh that's the one that that's the one that said that that's weird cause I used to just the other day strange all right, so we're getting close to the and so I think it is time where I can go ahead and try unless there's other questions before I pull in that background seems like some of these these air really cool you're not coming in straight, jeff so if you get the digits, say from wherever you will they work in photoshopped as well. Oh yeah. Okay, awesome. They are transferrable both ways and in fact a lot of digit kit designers create them in photo show okay because they there there may be more options for them photoshopped has better time may be wrong about this. I know that actions are getting better and in elements but their actions or sometimes better but they're getting so close like five, six years ago they were a lot different but now they're they're kind of getting closer so but that is a great question because a lot of people are photoshopped users and once you have photoshopped, why would you you know, you spend all that money on it why would you go get elements? So yeah, you mentioned font organizer what does that do for you? Why would you want that? I think you can just pull certain fonts out of it use it and they and maybe I need to check with karen on this because she uses that more so but I don't use it, but I think it just kind of pulls it out and then you could put it back in there for a safe place I mean it's like a placement piece or something, so yeah, I know a lot of people use them, the people who have, like hundreds of fonts started limited, all right, so see, I think I'm going to go ahead because we only have a couple more minutes left I am gonna go ahead and bring in that laugh background, but here's one thing that I'm going to do first though I must save this because it's always ways that you can I don't want teo want to bring it in on a shepherd separate sheet of paper someone go blank file five by seven and then go find that background okay, I think it was towards the back but if it has a blue stripe when I may not be able to use this time I had to try something different which is not a big deal I thought I saw it down here maybe not well, this one would actually not be so bad either mrs saying that has a we just pulled one of these out just because it's gonna pull it out casey that that worked out ok so we could use that as the background cause it's kind of the same color scheme I'm just gonna go ahead and drag it and drop it select all and then drag and drop it into that and then it came to the very top which is totally fine because you know how to work with layers now it is dragged out to the back around here just pulling it down to the bottom one more and what I would probably do because it doesn't show this very well I'm going to go in here and maybe dio a light white stroke around that just to kind of make that pop a little bit more and I'm still gonna look for that background but I just wanted to kind of throw that in just to see if it was gonna work okay all right so I was doing the effects I'm going into strokes go ahead and put that in there and go back into effects there and put a stroke of white or something a little bit off white a little thicker baby okay all right go back in I'm just going for the heck of it go back into effect so we have a mentor to laughter we good but getting close very close very close okay had hadn't looked up for a while so I kind of forgot about that but I do want to go back just really quickly see if that background graphics party look a real quick maybe they took it out of version twelve yeah I don't see it in there so we're pretty much good will go ahead and save this as a j peg and then that's pretty much a wrap for today so I'm gonna go ahead and close out of that save it as I must save it again for us a psd and then file save as tips safer web it's not go in there let's not do that one and jay then we're finished you'll save it high and that's a wrap for that card way that really was fantastic I mean it seemed again the steps very straightforward it seems very easy to do I know a lot of people in the chances saying they were following along that's a great way to end today