Lessons

Lesson Info

Card Creation

Let's make some cards all right so this is what I like to do a lot because I don't buy cards much anymore because I have made so many of them but I would like to take photos not photos but scans of my son's artwork and normally it's a twelve by eighteen so it's way too big to put on my scanner because my scanner only does eight and a half by eleven so what I had to do is I have to either eh figure out if I could just do it in two difference slices or if it needs to be four different ones quadrants so I think this one here we did it in just two so let's go ahead and find the two pieces that we scanned in and they I think you're a pdf so that's fine we can slice those together so this one right here the bottom piece and then his hop so let's just open them up so we can see them before we slice them together. The way I used to do this is I would go and it's not that bad the old school way isn't that bad but this other way is so much easier I'm going to show you the old way just in case yo...

u don't have this feature what's they bring up I brought the top up so now I need to be bring the bottom up so the old way in case you have a very old version of photoshopped elements is thinking about what size is this going to be this right here is a four by six so I'm going to be making my cards four by six I went to michael's and I just bought a fifty pack of these and then I just get these printed off wherever I want to and then I used the glue on the back it could be clued dot it can be whatever you have at home I'm sure you guys have some of those old supplies back at home where it's a double sided tape tape and you can just tape it onto that generic card so I'm going to say four by six or four by six in my lay out what they have there's a photo is it pull it safe or more by six then alcohol three by tok got it and I'm going to be going with the witness four so let's let's switch those around and then okay there we go now all I have to do is drag and drop the pieces in rotate them and try to line them up try is the word here it's scanned in and high resolution that's another thing I don't know if I can probably mentioned this yesterday but when you're scanning your items and you want to scan it in at the highest resolution as you can just because it's better to always go with shrinking than enlarging so everybody's scanners a little bit different, so you'll have to make sure that you have you're setting set properly, so I'm just dragging and dropping them in. I'm going to rotate them, teo ninety, I'm holding down the shift key, and that will give me the perfect, um, angles and now I'm going to close out of those. Come on. Okay, zoom on in and we may have to overlap a little bit and what I used to dio back in the day I would overlap. Um, and then I would take down the opacity, zoom in really, really close. What? I'm trying to line these up and take down the opacity on that one so I can make sure than lining them up like what we did with the face yesterday, tom let's see, bring it up a little bit that looks pretty good. I may have to use my arrows to move it pixel by pixel. Um, not bad. We'll pretend this is perfect, right? And I'm take this back up. I'm going to merge these two together so I select both of them by holding down the shift key and then choosing merge layers. And then I'm going toe shrink it down and I'm probably gonna have to crop because of the sides. It looks like it's a little bit off but that's all right, so then I could just button it up on one side like this delete it and then move it on over cut off this side and do the same. I could have also done it another way which is easier. I could have done something like this and go in there and choose what I want to save and then I could go into select an inverse and hit the delete key and that would do all four sides at one time but I had to do it hard way first and then show you the easy way and then you can center it. Put your text over the top or whatever. Now this is the way he used to do it a few versions ago and that's fine if you can get it lined up but there's a really cool feature in here. Let me just close out of these guys no saving no saving and go into edits sorry, enhance photo merch and then go to photo merge panorama photo marge panorama and it's going to bring up this new little pop up box and this is where I don't usually mess around with these right here because, um all my photos lineup really good when I use auto so I haven't played around with ease but if you ever want to try it out, try those out it'll do the perspective cylinder coal and then the spirit kal in the collage so chest those out if you need to but I've never had to use is anything other than auto now I'm going to it says where are your source files so I'm gonna click on browse you need to know where your source files are so I'm going to click on the bottom and I might hold the control key down and then shoes top so I've got both of those pieces of scans you could have five or six if you want if you do a panoramic view and you shoot about five or six it'll also line all of them up so this is just happens to be just two pieces and at first I thought did they have to be j pegs but they do work let me just click the button first and make sure but they do work with pdf some pretty sure so we have blend images together you make sure that that is checked then yet removal I'm not going to worry about I'm not going to worry about the bottom one I'm going to click on okay and you always cross your fingers a little bit there and make sure that it works all the way through when you have four, five pictures and you're getting high rez files it could take a few seconds for it to line up because it's taking all of those pixels and making sure that they're all perfectly aligned so sometimes it takes a little bit of time this right here it says, do you automatically do you want to automatically fill in the edges? Sometimes I will sometimes they won't sometimes it will take a long time to fill in those edges in this case there's a pretty solid colors around there, so I'm going to go ahead and say yes so you can see what it does um it'll take and it'll think about what kind of pixels are going to fall in that area because that is where the transparency is and we want to fill that in another way you could do it is you can go ahead and say no I don't care for you to fill that in and then you can just crop it down and that's usually what I dio but I wanted to have you guys see how this works if you have five or six photos, it could freeze on you it's done that to me before since this was a pretty easy one I was I was reassured that I could press that ok button but sometimes see what it says right there hi memory usage so it does it it really sucks a lot of memory out of this program for some reason, so just be careful of that, all right? So now I am going to have to shoot I'm gonna have to crop it just a little bit and then rotate it one way, but if I'm just going to go ahead and send this to walgreens or costco or persnickety prints, I can just go into my crop tool, go down tio my restriction area and put in four by six and then go ahead and choose the area that I want tio save I want this to be kind of centered, so I'm gonna kind of this and then I'm going to rotate it major rotate ninety degrees, right? Sorry I said right, but I chose left uh one eighty and now we have it all lined up perfectly it's funny because the eye teases you because right here he did that on his page in it on the other one, I thought it wasn't lined up right? But that's how his actual photo are his actual art piece is so it is actually lined up all perfectly you can't even tell where the scene wass which I love it's great and you can look over here and you've got these pieces that shows you how it was put together so need love that and after you know for sure that you have everything okay you're going to go ahead and right click and you khun flatten that image hidden discard him hidden layers that's fine because we're not going to mess around with it so we're gonna go ahead and click on okay and then on the top of that usually you put get well soon whatever you want to as far as your as far as what kind of car you're going to be creating so let's just make let's this may say this is going to be a happy birthday card there's a lot of space at the bottom which will allow for some text so that was where my I first went when I thought where am I going to put the text so let's just go ahead and get our text tool and I'm going to get a color that maybe comes from the photo itself um I'm gonna pick this I don't know if this will look good this bright yellow but let's pull that bright yellow out get our tech still click once and the cool thing about this is if you want to make these individual you could make them really customize and put happy birthday grandpa whoever whatever you want to do on here so you can really customize it I have no idea what I just typed alright doobies knew I didn't spell it right okay, very boring. Fonso we're going to make sure that it's a little bit cheery, more cheery font I don't really care for the color. So let's go through some of the different thoughts that's just use this one you could do nesting with the fought like we talked about yesterday. We can try different things with the typography. This is very plain and simple. If you wanted to add some borders to this a quick and easy way to do that would be just to go ahead and get your blank layer on the top. You can choose control a to select all if you wanted to put a border around that and I don't know if we talked about this yesterday or not, but we could do a double border at this point as well. I don't think we did so let's just do that. I'm going to go up tio edit and stroke outline selection this is where sometimes you have to play the guessing game on how how wide you want this border to be, so I'm just going to do a double border so it's going to be pretty thick? I'm going to go with maybe twenty five maybe I don't know if that's going to thick enough location of your stroke on that. I'm going to go with inside because if you go with center it means it's going to take that twenty five and divide it by two because it'll go from the center on out so I'm going to go with the location as being inside you can change the blending mode at this point, which I usually rarely d'oh but just know that you can change that blending mode you can change the opacity as well I like to change the opacity in the next step because I have more control so that's not a thick enough border so I'm gonna go back in there amigo stroke selection and go seventy five and click on ok it's going to pretty thick but I wanted to do a double border and I also wanted to be able to show you that if you go over to your opacity you can take that opacity down and you can see through the border a little bit so that's always an option if you think it's too stark or whatever now just a double border I'm gonna go on another layer put another layer on top I might have like a nothin stripe of ah blue so I'm gonna go with blue from our layout I would go back into control a to select all and then I'm going to stroke the outline selection and let's just go with maybe twenty five at this point and now we have a little bit of the double border if you wanted to put even a triple border all you'd have to do is go down to this layer click on new layer and maybe we'll pull out another one just for the sake of checking it out go get the red will pull some red and there were down below that so we can go higher than seven we have to go higher than seventy five so we're gonna go teo select all go to edit stroke outline selection let's go with one twenty five inside and now it has a triple border makes sense it's a little bit much but looks like retro it looks like the seventies doesn't it all right any questions on that before we make another card all good it's fun okay it's really cool that you could really save a lot of money I don't want ever bythe almost like the hand written notice it's really and it's a very personal what what a great idea for business owners tried to create their own message yeah yeah it's fun because well, now that I have a dog I can use my dog for cards dogs are great for get well soon because they make people smile so that's what we're gonna do next and now a dog card get well soon card so and this could be anything that I was going to pull up a I was going to pull up something but I'm not going to but one of our grandpas was in the hospital and he had to have surgery and funny story he had the anesthesia and so he was talking really funny and he said he's he told his wife he said tell big bird to stop and I made a card for him so you can imagine what it was was a big bird riding on a snow plow to tell big tell big birds get off the snow power and his wife is like what are you talking about big bird is riding a snowplow so she told me that story and I I just thought it was the funniest thing so of course I had to make a personalized card with big bird riding a still plow so very funny but I don't know he's not watching so he's okay so I would go ahead and save it and if you wanted to use this as a backdrop for other cards like you khun do one as happy birthday and then you could change it to whatever else you want or happy birthday shawn happy birthday chris or whatever and change him and save him off his different ones I'm going go file save as but when his shoes and make sure that ptsd is my um choice of format and I'm going to save it as a happy birthday I'm glad these air within reach that's, how about my eyes already got bad with him like a few months because the last time I was here I didn't have to put my glasses on. This was pretty bad all right, cut that and now we have that saved off we didn't save it is j peg just yet but you could save it as a j peg um to make sure that you uploaded to the printer alright this this next card that worked to create let me see if I have ah hey, is this one good? Is this one right here? This is a part of I think it's snickerdoodles um peace now tell you the name of it here shortly ah it's a very simple, very easy to create we have, um a cluster and then we also have a photo and then some text so if you look over here to the right all it's going to be is four different layers easy, easy as my son's teacher says all the time I love it and who couldn't who doesn't love that little face now he's really not hanging there? It really is not hanging there. See we've got this going on okay don't want people to say all that poor dog so we had the hand behind their um we have text over here to the right right justified and some text we mix the text. We've got two different fonts, which I kind of like to see in layouts. Um, usually I do they sarah and sand sara font this time I think they're both with the air sara font so but that's ok, whatever looks appealing and we have a little bit of a drop shadow to them as well. If you zoom in really close you're going to see that this is a very textured paper and it looks really cool when it's printed out. You can also put your own ribbons on their just because this is here what I sometimes do with some of my embellishments they have from years ago is all poke a hole in there and then put that in there and tie it back in there with a little ribbon across it. So it's got a three dimensional card as well and you can also a lot of those air stick ons so you can stick one in the corner or or whatever you need. Tio do you guys ever do the glitter in your cards? Whenever I get glitter, cars are like, oh, it goes all over the place don't you think that but now the glitter is it's kind of nice, though it gives it that three dimensional look you usually put the glue on and then he sprinkle the little glitters on it but when it comes out of the card it it goes all over the place so all right so let's go ahead and it started let's look and see what the size is let's go to image resized image size just to see we've got a four by six I do a lot of four by six cards because that's I got a pack of fifty was only a few dollars for a pack of fifty um and you know if you divide that by fifty and usually spent about two dollars a card you're saving a lot of money so and those four by six is air very inexpensive you can get him a slow is like fifteen cents or even lower than that but it's just I like really do you liketo create my own cards let's open up this this is the first piece that I'm gonna look at because this is kind of like our baseline this is our um our background so I'm going to open up this png just to see what the size is because they not sure if it's going to four by six or five by seven or whatever let's go file image our image resize and image size it happens to be four by six jumped to ninety nine nine nine nine but let's just throw in that three hundred just because I'm not going to make any difference but we're good one little pixel it's not going to hurt it, and then I'm going to go and make sure that I save it as something else because I don't want to override her. Um it's m p kitty and tweet b b six so I can't it's the kitty and tweet um, digital kit. Yeah, so let's go with file and save us and change it to a psd and let's, just call this get well card and it's in the proper folder. Just make sure you always check to see where you're putting it because you want to keep everything nice and neat and then I'm going to go ahead and bring in my first photo, so I'm gonna go file and place bring in this photo here needs to go in the back so let's, go ahead and drag and drop it after we clicked the checkmark drag drop and because I don't really want to his hand to be shown, I want it to look like he's just hanging in there, you could actually what would be good to put in there is hang in there? Yep, it wasn't thinking, so hang in there, get well, soon will be a great one, it would be kind of fun to be a car designer and I don't know. If you wanted to, you could go in there, and I know there's like a little ridge around here, which is kind of nice, but let's just say you really wanted that card to our this border to be a little bit thinner because these clusters air so easy you can change them a little bit, you can go in and click on that and let's say you wanted tio maybe make this a little bit bigger as far as the the hole that you see your image through if you needed a little bit more space and there let's just kind of guess it about like that we can hit the delete key, but what the delete key is going to do is it's going to dilate part of that ribbon? So if we wanted to spend a lot of time and mask it and make it perfect, we could do that, but I don't usually have all that much time when I'm making card, so I don't this in this case, I would probably just go and get my quick selection tool, and I think, yep, what we could do is this whole down that all key and d select that now if you release it it's going to be a plus again, so then you can go in there and add to it I keep getting a little bit too much let's ah actually I know what I'll do we'll go get this, we can mix and match all these pieces if you are this brings me to a good point if you spend a lot of time selecting something you can always going to select and save that selection from the very bottom so if you're spending a lot of time making a selection and you have to go off and go to lunch or whatever you're going to save it right away, I'm just going to call this frame, click on okay and then let's just say I made a mistake and I went to different layout and I'm like, oh gosh has spent so much time making that selection at least I haven't saved somewhere so I can go to select load selection I pick it for my drop down sometimes you'll have two or three different selections to pick from, but it should be once you say once you named it should be in that drop down selection I'm gonna pick frame you could do the inverse of it if you want to, but I'm just gonna go ahead and keep it as is and then go okay and when I need to do is I need to delete this part in here so let's go get this tool here and then I just need just a little bit uh little piece yeah just a little piece in here let's just pretend that's good enough all right now I can go ahead and hit the delete key and I'll give me a little bit more space but I'm just kind of wanted you all see that just because a cluster is the way it is you can kind of altered to fit your particular need if you hit that delete key right now we're on the right layer it will go ahead and give you a little bit more room so that you can have more room for your photo you needed to have a little bit more showing or if you need to enlarge it just a bit tio groups apply all right now I have a little cat next to him which is we have to do the cat and the dog just in case that family has a cat so we don't want to feel with the cancer being left out and so we're going to go ahead and on the right hand side is a perfect place for some of the text to lie if you think that you need more space on the right hand side we probably could finagle a little bit we could do and I don't know how this is gonna work cause I haven't tried it but just now thinking about it if you had to have a little bit more space maybe we could push this over a bit let's just give it a little bit. I'm looking at this space right here and looking at this space right here someone to push it a couple more and let's just let's just think about this. We could probably take a slice of that and line it up perfectly if we tried let's go in the hair and let's do this right here. It's probably not going to be perfect and karen might be watching saying, oh, I'm goingto, um make sure that that is simplified. Yep. I'm holding my shift and my all key at the same time and it will create a copy of what I just had a few hold the shift and that all key down it will create a copy and it will also go straight over now. What happened? There is it's it's got this little bit of ah um ridge now, but if we took this I'm just trying to come kind of was thinking through this hold on here we took that piece. Oh, you know what I did it's not on a different layer let's get that different layer here. Okay? So it's on its own it's not on his own layer, but I really should have put it on its own layer so let's cut that so I'm control ex control v we'll cut it and paste it onto a new layer and now we can kind of play around with it a little bit more since its on its new layer so I'm gonna come in here and I wantto see if this a work I'm going to kind of push this this way and it might work but it might not let's just go back a little bit let's line it up and it looks a little better it's not you know it's not as noticeable me just make sure that I think it's one pixel off or maybe I just didn't select enough of it all right so we're good with that it is a little bit darker over there but it might flow with the with the texture it might be one pixel off let's go ahead and get our text tool and I think we're going to need to go with a lighter color for our text so I'm going to go over and get might white for my foreground color or pulling something from our layout must have moved that guy let's get him over a little more go to the top layer and let's merge these guys together once we know we got to go in there emerge layers and now I'm gonna get my text tool and I'm going to click and drag a big text box and what do we say hang in there and I'm gonna selected make sure it's the size that we wanted to be and I'm going to write just if I may be a little bit smaller check out the leading push that letting in there um sally and then get well soon many kaput you know, a signature on there whatever you wanted tio now we want to button up the text a little bit let's just make it a little bit more funky I'm gonna pick a let's go a little bigger on that one thirty six let's try bigger we'll put the focus on the person who's sick and then we'll put the make this a little bit smaller and let's just go with it more simple text I guess because we want to come if you wanted to just pull one piece of if you only want to pull the get well soon up and you don't really want uh anything else to move you could just highlight just one line of text and then you could push it up you don't have to do all the text at one time. Normally when I'm demonstrating I'll click everything and everything will be alone the leading would be all exactly the same, but if you only needed to move up just a little bit with two different lines those lines right there will be moved up more down with just selecting so I want to move this one up a little bit, groups and I also want to put a little bit of a drop shadow, and they're just so it had kind of pops a little bit more. Someone get my text to are you don't have to have my text to obama, go to my layers panel and make sure I'm on the text layer go to my effects, bring in the drop shadow. If I wanted teo, I could go into the layer and later style and give it more of a customized drop shadow aa lot of times, people will email me and say, you know, we're putting text over the top of a background, and it doesn't show up. It is not very readable sometimes I would tell them, just go ahead and go into the style settings, and then there's also a glow. You could put a glow on the back of your text so there's an outer glow that it will pop a little bit more and that's just kind of like a little thing that you forget about, because we do have the inner and the outer glow, and you can change the opacity to you don't have to make it so stark right now, let me just make it really start, so if you wanted teo, I mean, if this was black text, it might stand out pretty good, but I would usually generally take it down and the size down a little bit just so it stands out so that's the first thing I would really recommend to my members, they do have some little bitty text that's on a really cool background I don't want they want to use that background and when he's text of the top of it but if you want it to be readable, you're going to have to maybe do some drop shadows are outer glows there's inner glows as well that work with that worked really well with the thicker fonts, sometimes with the thinner fonts and the smaller fonts doesn't work, so also you just got to kind of play around with it, see what works all fonts are different, so all the kern ings different preach font and so on so forth. All right, this is where the hard to figure that out it's so weird how I don't have my little buttons that the bottom has it ever happened to any of you guys? See how there's the buttons, but they're not showing, so I know that this is the ok button something click it and then we are good with that greeting card, make sure you're at least a quarter of an inch away from the side and you can pull your rulers up and make sure that they are that way with the rulers so let's go to rulers we got six lets us pull it in here write it write here is the six and a quarter so we're right on the money right there over here it might be a little bit it might be pushing it but I think we'll be okay I always focus on the text more so when it comes tio it bleeding off because the text is the part that's not going to be good if it bleeds off the side let's look at the layers pants are the layers panel we did that in just three layers easy as pie go to think easy, easy, easy, easy let's go ahead and save it say that this is all kind of like ok, we know how to save but I want to make sure go file save as and save it as a psd if you want to say your fight layers and j peg if you don't go ahead and save it cause I know that spelled everything right because he told me he's not and we are good tio upload that to a printer. Any questions on card making students don't have any questions we do have a couple of questions that relate to the output ok, yeah we do I know that you show this example here but this question comes from a carlston in the chat room they say what are good sizes for cards when you're working with printers? Is there one that you always use or their variety of sizes people can print, I would go to wherever you gonna get it printed. First, I would go to that, uh, online store, whatever find out what size they have. First, I do all my cards with just hand done, really? I go out and buy a fifty pack at michael's or hobby lobby or any of those hobby shops? The fifty packs usually come in the four by six is or the five by seven, so that's what I would start out with first, find out what you're going to use it for as faras. Are you going to have them printed at a card place and find out what size they need? Because you don't want to sit there and spend an hour or two on a card and you created it? What are you can created a five by three and then you go home and they don't have the size, and then you have to you can enlarge it or you can shrink it down, but it may not be proportionate, so find out what the outcome of the printer or if you're gonna be just printing off the four by six is four by six five by seven. Those two sizes I usually stick with because they're standard that's very yeah, because you know, it's one thing to make the card, but you got to figure out how you're going to get it on either there or you can. I mean, I've do in cards through other places like shutterfly and persnickety probably has cards, too, and it just upload it and and then they send me, and it looks really professional. Sometimes you can get a picture in the back, sometimes you can put stuff in inside. I just keep it looked really, really simple and purchase just the just the standard ones from michael's or hobby lobby and then glued on their great great well, I know after watching that segment, I'm never gonna buy a card, I've been convinced, so hopefully a lot of you out there will go and try to make your own cards as well, but we are coming up to our break time, and I know that in the next segment, we have karen coming back, and you're gonna be talking a little bit about brushes. Is that right now? She is she's going to, they're going to cut this kind of continuation of what she did yesterday, tying it all together and talk about brushes and everyone good, excellent. Yeah, looking forward to that before we do take off, I do want to read a few more comments that are coming in. This one is from purple mary in the chat room. They say, I'm so loving this so many great things, I'm learning here, scrapping mom, six says, thank you, michelle is doing so great. I love this and be trumper, who was in the room yesterday as well. Welcome back, they say. I usually use another printer to make my cards, but after watching this section on card making, I'll be using photoshopped elements. Twelve I didn't realize that I could use my pdf files in psc for card making. Michelle, you have no idea how much I've learned from you and karen during the last two days.