Lessons

Lesson Info

Create a 10 by 10 Layout

do our final layouts. This is what we're gonna create now. It is going to be a lot of different selections. We're gonna talk about selection tools, um, the refined tool, the, um lasso. And there's one more gets out of my brain right now, but we'll get to it. So masking and selections, those two tools are used a lot when you start getting into intermediate in the advanced area. So let's go ahead and pull up the final. The final layout right here is the thumbnail that I did before. I got started with this layout and I didn't know for sure which photos I was gonna use, but I wanted to find some photos that were somewhat similar to this. Um, I wanted it to be all pretty much I knew I was going to be using this one photo, So in the bottom left hand corner. But I didn't know for sure which was gonna work up here, so I just quickly took out the pencil paper and do did a really quick thumbnail. First, this one is going to be a 10 by 10. So what I did and what you might want to do when you are ...

when you are thinking about doing a collage, if you know you're gonna be doing a collage, make sure that maybe you take a picture of the background that's gonna it's gonna work well with its gonna blend together because if you used a white background and each started bringing in all these things with the red background, it won't blend as much. So what I did was I went ahead and took a picture of the couches. I knew that I was gonna be bringing in a lot of red backgrounds with the red with the red on it. So took a picture of the couch, and I went ahead and got my, um I gotta get my crop tool and it's gonna be a by 10. So I'm gonna go into 10 by 10 the bottom here, click and drag around the area that you want. Teoh Select and make sure it's at 300. So we're good there. We're gonna go in and we're gonna be using a selection tool that is called the refine tool. So when you are selecting little pieces of hair, it is much easier to use the refined tool that it is the lasso tool. The lasso tool is really hard to get in. Teach a little hair. So the refined tool. I think it was in version 10 11 and 12. The refined tool will help you and toe pull out some of these little hairs that he has on his head because you're not going to go and sit there, get the lasso tool and do this. You're just not gonna do it right? I'm not gonna do it. I don't have the time to do that. So there is a really cool tool that helps you with that. Gonna go down to him. And I know that I'm only gonna really need to select his head and maybe a little bit down here. So I don't really need to select his whole body because just the head part is gonna go over to they lay out. So before you use the refine until you have to kind of make a little bit of a selection, it does not have to be perfect. But you have to take whatever selection tool that you think is appropriate. So I'm gonna be using this quick selection tool. You compress the A on the keyboard to get to it. If you want to use that quickie command, and I'm gonna go and select right about here, I'm getting mostly the head area and his ear. I'm gonna come down, and here again you can, um, add two selections or subtracted from selection. So if you make a mistake, it's not a big deal. Let's get a little bit more of his body. I'm not sure it's better to go a little bit more then 22 little. So I'm just gonna get a little bit more than what I think I need once you have that selection. Now, let's see. I think I have a feather on that, which I don't know. I don't have a feather on that. Okay, good. In this case, I'm not gonna put a feather on it. Sometimes you can you might want to put like, a one or a two, but in this case, I'm just gonna do it without a feather to see how it works. Once you have that selection, I'm gonna go ahead and save it, just in case I'm gonna go select and save this. Gonna put dog up here. Once the that selection is still dancing, we're gonna go ahead and click on refined edge. If you don't have something selected, you're not. That refined edge is gonna be great out. So it'll say you need to make a selection first and then hit that refined edge. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit refined edge and over here to the right, there's gonna be a pop up box. There's all kinds of different ways that you can do this. It just depends on the photo. You couldn't do it as marching ants, which I rarely choose. You could do it as an overlay, which sometimes I will use that one for this case. I think I'm gonna do on black because I can see it a little bit better. So let's just try the on black and then I'm gonna come out to my, um, my dog here, and I think I'm gonna zoom in a little bit so you can see it a little more And let's see if I can make my yet I can use my right bracket left bracket and I'm gonna come in here and I'm just gonna click and kind of go around the selection. And what it's gonna do is it's gonna help me decide what those little hairs are. See how it's picked. Can you see that? See how it's picking those hairs out of there now is gonna go around this area. Hey, come around here. This works good with normal people hair, too. And it may not be perfect. Perfect, but it sure beats going in there and ah, using that lasso tool, see how that is? I'm not crazy. I just jumped for joy when this came into photo shop elements. Because I especially now that I have this little furry guy, people that don't don't get how I used to do this, they're like, What's the big deal? I I was like, Well, when I saw this, I'm like, yes, over here. See how choppy that ISS is going there and you and it's going to give a great selection. And since I have this on a red background, it's not a big deal that there's a little bit of a halo there. But if you wanted to get really, really picky, you can play around with this stuff over here. Okay, so there's a smoothing. There's the feather and all that. Normally, I don't even have to worry about that. But if you really are doing something, that is something that you want to really make perfect. You can do that. So I'm just going all around. It's picking the hairs that it needs to. Let's go up in here a little bit. I think I need a little bit more up in there So funny. High, slow, higher. Stick up their guy. All right, We're gonna be fine with that. Although I am gonna go around this here. Yes, I have a question. You find that in the quick selection tool, the refine it, you know, it will be up and running with any of the any of those selection tools. So if you chose Teoh, use the lasso tool, it'll it'll be there. But there has to be a selection first because when I first came about in, like, how do I get to that refined tool? But you have to make a selection first, then hit the refined button. But I think it will work with the lasso, the quick selection or any of those selection tools. Okay, as long as you have a selection, All right, so we're going to say This is perfect. Let's go ahead and click on OK, and it's gonna go ahead in there and it's gonna try to select each individual hair. And then I'm gonna get my move tool, drag it and drop it into my page. And then we can kind of zoom on in if we want Teoh to see how it worked. So, yeah, it worked out pretty good. See how the little hairs are right there? Much easier. So that's one really cool way of making a selection for furry friends or people to Let's go ahead and apply. And let's move out of this one and bring in another wait another way of making a selection. So the refined tool Let's go with this one. Let's go with Let's use this one. I like the feather feature, especially when you have, like, colors like I'm going from red to Red. Now, this background does not have the same uh, mid tones and darkness, but we're going to change that background. To really blend in with this other couch actually looks better there. That on my screen might it's muted a little bit, so we don't have to do too much to it. But we do have to kind of match those colors. Anytime you're taking pictures, the lighting might be different. The angle might be different. So we're gonna try to match those. All right, so let's go over and get the lasso tool, and I'm gonna put a little bit of a feather on there. So let's go down to our feather in the bottom corner there and let's go with Maybe, but I guess I'm gonna go with, um 50 45. Let's go with 45 now, when you put too big of a feather, if, for instance, this happens to people a lot, I know. So I'm just gonna go ahead and show you a mistake. I'm gonna make on purpose if you select something that's really, really small and it doesn't it can't feather that much. It's going to say warning, You're gonna go. What? What did I do wrong? No, pixels are more than 50% selected. So because you did it, like about a 45 down here, you have to make sure that you have enough pixels to feather. So just I just want to warn you about that, cause I know that that has happened to me before, And when it first happened, I didn't know what I did wrong. So I'm gonna take that. But I need to add to that selection. So I hold down my shift key. It's gonna give you a little plus in there. So you know, you're adding, I'm just gonna go ahead and add this area here and now. There should be a feather enough that it's not gonna be real noticeable when I pull it in here. I might have gone a little bit higher, but I'm gonna go ahead and use this because we might do some masking with it. You will see. And we're gonna try to match those colors of of red to get him a little bit more close. So when your 1st 2 in a collage, it looks kind of choppy and everything, But whenever at the very end, everything will come together. So that's another way of making a selection to try to make the collage a little bit, uh, less seamless. Now, if I wanted to, I could test it out and just see let's go toe, ah, 100 feather, 100 feather and see it That even helps us a little bit more. Let's go toe about anywhere between 90 105 someone to click and drag around this area. I can hold the Alte down to give me a negative so I can take away some of that selection. The shift key will add if you forget that no big deal, it's all down here for you. Get the move tool. This might work a little better. It might be a little bit less will be seen more seamless. So now I can just delete that background. Um, let's go over here and close out and then delete that Bottom one. You can move this to the trash can or you can right click and delete so you can do it. Either way, it's pull us down the corner, shrink it down a bit, haven't go off the page. We have one more photo to bring in. So let's go file and open. This was here. I think I used the refined edge on this one. So let's go ahead and do that real quick. I'm gonna do I like the quick selection, But let's just do the last one I'll show you once you have it selected. This is really bad selection the refine edges right down here so that button will be available when you use. If you use the lasso tool, have a huge feather on that, so that wouldn't work anyway. But so let's go back in there. I'm just going to use the quick selection because I like that one. That was another one that I really liked at the addition. Teoh is going to quickly select him, and I need to hold the all turkey down to de select up here and let's zoom in a little bit for that. There's a lot of little hairs there, so let's go in there and try to get as many as we can. And then I would go to Refine Edge and I'm gonna go around it really quickly. Use the black again. I even go up in there to kill lawyers up. They're so cute. We went into the pet store to buy A. I wish I could get a, um, like a little guinea pig or something, and then they brought the dogs in and it just didn't work for us to leave without one. I really wasn't prepared for it. Hey was killed. He's still cute. But not as cute as he was. Bobby. Yeah. Thank you. When I first that I, uh he's not what? Theo things you say. Oh, all right. This is looking kind of monkey up here. I'm not sure you know, Bad is gonna have a little halo effect, but, you know, you can always go in here and play around with this if you need to get really picky, because I don't think the hair upon the boys not working is good down here. It's okay. Let's get that air here in there. Okay. Good enough. You guys get the idea? All right. So I'm gonna click on OK and move him on over. Perfect. He's gonna kind of slide off the side, gonna bring him to the top. And now we gotta work on trying to get that red lined up, doesn't it? Looks okay on screen. So let's just kind of play around with this background layer to kind of make it blend a little bit. We can also do it this way. We can take a mask and mask it and slide it more to that color. But I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna take this background. I'm gonna go with an adjustment layer because it's not gonna hurt it. So let's go with the levels and let's just push this up, okay? It's blending better there, and I don't I think I need to do that. That's good enough for that to make sure it looks good on that screen. OK, so we've got it matched pretty good. So we may not even have to worry about masking down there cause you guys got the masking part down, I think Remove these guys into position. If we need Teoh, I'm gonna pull it in a little bit saying I'm gonna put ah a border around there. So let's pull this in. A lot of times my members will email me and they will say how I've got a background that the text just does not look good over the top of I say, Why don't you put like a ah white box and then take the box down in opacity and then because it will shine through that way, could Sometimes people don't want things to be covered up. He's gonna need to be a little bit less harsh on the bottom. But let's just put that box there first to see if we can disguise it that way. I'm gonna move this to the top so we can work up here. I'm gonna bring in a new layer, so I'm gonna go create a new layer. I'm gonna go over and I'm gonna get my rectangle marquee tool. And I'm just gonna bring in a box right about here. It's gonna go behind. The boy, actually is in the front of them now, but we're gonna move it, move it down, and then I'm gonna fill it with a white color. So let's get a white get our, um pay bucket tool. Fill that. Actually, let's move this around a little bit. This is gonna go on the top, and the boy's gonna go in the top. Okay, What's going behind him? So we could either keep it at a really stark white, or we can take this down in opacity. Bring the passage down. I'm probably going to go in there and erase part of the dog just to kind of make it blend a little bit more and maybe I'll move him down, Teoh, or maybe make him a little bit smaller cause we want to put that, um, title in there as well. So we'll deal with that later. We're gonna deal with the text now. So on top of that layer, I'm gonna go ahead and do some texts and maybe I will use a deeper red in color. I'm gonna get my Pulis appear real quick, text tool and let's get a dark red. And I'm going to make sure that the text I uses a somewhat easy to read font Let's go with maybe 14 Point is, this is gonna be body content and I'm gonna go with an auto letting and I'm gonna click and drag. This is where her text will go. And this font is not gonna work. It's not gonna cut it, So I'm gonna highlight it and try it. Just aerial something very, very simple and maybe go a little bigger. I don't know. This might be this might be okay. Let's just keep it as is, And I'm just in a copy and paste it for I think it's a little bit too close to each other. So let's tighter. Let's loosen up that letting three clicks and you can select it all. And let's push that letting out a little bit would have a little too much. Not about 30 more down there and let's keep it like that. All right, so that makes your text easier to read. If you wanted to be on top of a textured background, Um, and you can play around with that opacity to get it perfect. You can also you know, of course, Dube evals and drop shadows and anything you want to as faras kind of making it pop a little bit more. I'm gonna go into the bubbles just to kind of put a little bevel on there. I'm going to left, justify. And also I'm gonna need to do some hard returns because it's going behind the boy. Someone left justify for it first and then I'll just decide where I need Teoh do that. I'm just gonna cut up me annually. Do it. Let's just pull this down a little bit more so that we can. There we go. Let's pretend that that last word isn't there. I was bringing in. So so it flows better. Okay, I'm gonna go into that layer with this doggy and see if I can't fix that. Make it look a little bit less harsh. So either a. If you wanted to go the old fashioned way when we didn't have all these bells and whistles, you can go get your eraser tool. You could play around with the opacity change. So if I went in there with the opacity down there, like 30% or 50% or whatever, I could go to that layer. And I could just go in there and quickly fix it. If I needed Teoh by. Let's just turn this off so we can see it better. And that's fine. So now I'm going in there and kind of taking Neil Pass it down. This is probably not the best way to do it, but I didn't want to show you that we do have that eraser tool that you can play around with the opacity if you needed to, kind of, um, make a little bit smoother transition between the two. And let's just take the opacity way down. I'm kind of come up here and do that now, when we turn this back on its not as harsh because that's a really quick fix. That coming come over here and kind of do that as well. You can use the masking too, all right, And I'm gonna rotate him just a bit. Right? Which way of selecting do you guys like? The best so far is the mall. But I have never used them all at the same time. On that was something interesting to learn that you could combine the two of them to make it more effective. Sometimes in your head, you just have this way that you always use and you don't venture out. So I wanted to do three different ways. You can select in one photo, so you have everything to choose from, so all right, Cool. Okay. The text is going to go on the top layer, but im we've already covered text a lot, so I'm not gonna worry about it. Um, the ampersand sign is a lot larger. You can, you know, put the ampersand sign in the background and take down the opacity. I'm gonna take the text. I'm gonna put, uh, text in there real quick did it to do to do. Where is it? There it is. Enlarge that one. So I put that here, and I like Teoh mix. This fought in there. I like to have that little ledge on there so you can put some text on. So let's go through and see which one we're gonna be using. Our, which one we could use. Oh, boy, that's there. That's a cool one. So mixing that in there, boy and his dog, making sure that the dog, um layer is sitting right on top of that little piece right there. Once you're finished due to save it, I'm going to actually put a, uh, let's put a border on there because I think it will tie it all together. Let's go the top layer. We did this. No other one. But let's go bring in a new layer. You select all whenever you want to put a border on control A or command A on the Mac. I'm gonna go to image are Sorry. I'm going to go to edit and stroke outline selection. I'm gonna put a really thick white border on here. I'm gonna take a guess and go 1 50 It might be too big and make sure that the white is selected. I'm gonna go on the inside because it's gonna go on the inside of the marching ants. I'm gonna go ahead and keep it at a hunt. Percent opacity and normal, and that is too big. So let's go 1 to 100. Let's go. it's stroke outline and then maybe I'll do another one. That's a red one. But whatever you want, you know you can mix the colors and such, but I'm going to go to another layer and go with edits. Stroke outline, selection. I'm gonna go with 50 this time, and with a red color, I'm gonna pull it from my background. Make sure you get a deeper red. That probably looks okay on the screen there. Let's go with that one and click on OK, it just ties it together, and I like to kind of show that there's something poppy out of the photo. So let's take let's take the boy. Of course, you need to be in front of that and percents on anyway, let's drag it and drop it above, and it's like he's falling off the page, which I kind of like some of de select and pushed him off the side. Is it little bit dimension? So in the next three days, I want you guys to do a collage and use all the different selection tools and then tell me which one you like the best. I like the refined one. I like the refined tool for my selections, especially with hair, but I love the quick selection tool, but it just depends on what your photo is. You have to look at the photo first and say, Okay, is there a lot of little pieces that I need to select? If there's not, it's okay just to use whatever you know, the quick selection. If there is ah ah, hard contrast between the subject that you want to select and the background sometimes that quick selection is is easier than the refined tool. But when you have hair little bitty pieces like trees, grass, that refined tool is the one I think about first, when I see what I'm going to select, it'll save you a lot of time and a lot of hassle. So if you wanted to change the size of this, you can just pull it. I needed to a little bit smaller. Alright, save it and you're good. I have one little, little slow, Um, segment that I want to get to. We're going to revisit our why and why we do this. If you over the last two days, we've kind of talked a lot about different ideas. Is there anything that sparked your memory? Um, by looking at some of my examples, I have a few examples that I want to show you just to kind of get your creative juices going. So tomorrow you can go home and get some layouts done. I know you're not gonna do it. Tonight s so I'm not going to force that on you. It's Friday. We're not gonna scrap on Friday night unless you really want Teoh. So I'm just going to show you a few layouts just to kind of get your juices creative juices flowing. See where I put those. Okay, so we talked a little bit about this year to I've got the year three in here is well, and that's where I stopped. You know, you gotta keep go when I need to keep going. I don't necessarily have to do month to month, though, because that's just the first few years. You're not going to get that crazy. And to you don't have Teoh. It doesn't have to be perfect. You know, we we can do layouts that don't don't match. Don't. The colors aren't working. It doesn't really matter. As long as you're getting all your memories down on paper like my sister does. She's got a notebook there. She she doesn't have time to scrap book right now. Um, she just writes down the date. She'll say, You know, uh, he broke his arm this week or whatever. Uh, we were in the hospital for two days. Those types of things you don't you don't remember when you are like me and have a terrible memory. So this was a two page spread right here. I, um very, very simple layout. Just use the circle tool to grab and drop over this one here. Very simple as well. I use the eye. I brighten the eyes a little bit to make those stand out a little bit more. Cisco and they're a little bit of fun. Backyard fund got to get the grand parents in there at all times. Uh, this is the other set of grand parents. So I did a two page spread of them. That was the day they got married. And then that was our wedding. So pretty cool. This is when they were kids. So that's JC's great grand art. That's juices grandparent's. But I think it would be so cool. Toe have, like something like this, with all the great grand parents and as it goes down the line just to see the differences. And I put all of their hobbies that they did when they were younger. We all kind of look a teacher's, I think, when I was younger, when I had a teacher and I saw my teacher, like at the grocery store, I'm like my teacher goes to the grocery store. We don't think of teachers as real people. Did you remember that when you were little? We don't think of our grandparent's says, You know, they went to see movies, or what movies did. They go watch and we don't We just don't think of them as real people. For some reason, it's really weird. Yeah, my teachers at the grocery store. That's weird, or or worse yet, they're on a date or they're at the movies. You know, my teachers dates. That's weird. There's a bunch of teachers in here, so I had to throw that out there. People, kids, think of you as you know, up on this pattern stole and we're just human, you know? I love these glasses. He thought he was super cool in these classes. And I don't want to save all all those things. You know, you have so much. But taking the picture just reminds me. I forgot about those glasses again. Went to the park every single day home gosh, areas with his crazy cars. Thes air, my grandparent's So my son just got to meet my grandma just for a few months. And so this will be kind of cool for him to see. And that's the other side grandparent's and just cousins and the normal stuff. Oh my goodness. I had a fit on this one. That was I was terrified, and my hair color changes through the years. Like that girl. I love taking pictures. I've been doing this every year when we go to Michigan, the backside of them when they're looking at the ocean. Here's when it was the first year there. I just I think that's pretty cool. And there's my third year, so I need to get busy with my fourth year because he's already nine. Stop touching up.