Digital Scrapbooking Journal - Part Fourteen

Honing Your Skills

Visit part one of our Digital Scrapbooking Tutorial

Vellum Overlay = Opacity Adjustment

I love the dreamy look a vellum overlay gives to a layout or card design. When I learned I could duplicate that look digitally using Photoshop, I was just delighted. Then I found how easy it is and I was absolutely thrilled!

A vellum look is achieved digitally just by lowering the opacity of the layer you want to "vellum-ize". Think about it, vellum is used in paper scrapping for its opaque property. But the weight and color of vellum paper you purchase is what you're stuck with.

In digi-landia, you can change the color of the vellum.

I used a soft sage green for the vellum panel in this layout. Then you can customize the thickness or weight of the vellum using the Opacity slider on the Layers palette.

I used 72% opacity above.

How to Make Digital Vellum

Load a background paper into a new document. Use the Eyedropper tool to set the foreground color to white or a light color that coordinates with your paper. Layer>New>Layer.

With the new layer active, select the Shape tool of your choice. I used a rectangle.

Position the cursor on your document and hold down the clicker as you drag the cursor diagonally to size the shape. Release the clicker.

Adjust the Opacity slider until you have the level of transparency you want.

Emboss = Texturize

There are a couple of ways to create the appearance of 3D embossing with Photoshop. Here I'll walk you through using the Texturizer tool.

The three windows in the "Just because it's June" card are given an embossed appearance using the "Purple Daisies" Texture Preset* that comes with Photoshop. [ Incidentally, you decide what color you want. I just happened to want purple for this card. ]

* What's a Preset you ask? If you followed the tutorial on brushes, you've already created a Preset. Aren't you clever.

Presets are things that are - well - pre-set in Photoshop. However, as you now know, you can design and save some of your own.

You'll find the Presets in C:/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe (version)/Presets. Again, if you followed the brush tutorial, you can look in the Brushes Preset folder and see the brush file you created.

How to Digi-Emboss

Load a background paper into a new document. Use the Eyedropper tool to set the foreground color. Select the Paint Bucket tool and paint the background. Filter>Texture>Texturizer opens up the Texturizer tool box.

If you press the down arrow to the right of "Texture", you'll see a dropdown list of the other textures that are currently loaded. If you don't like any of those, press the right-facing arrow to the far right.

Press Load Texture and find your way to the Textures Preset folder which I told you about earlier to pick out a new texture. Once you've selected a texture, play with the sliders for Scaling and Relief until you get the size and depth you want.

I used 50% and 4 on my example.

Go to part one of our Digital Scrapbooking Tutorial

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