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Digital Tag

How to Create Three Dimensional Looking Digital Tags

Re: Make a Very Personal Wedding Gift with Digital Scrapbooking Techniques Query from UK.

Hi, I was admiring your creations and I will study the website more tomorrow, I just love it. I was wondering how you did the tag on the rose for your friend's wedding? I hope you could share it with me. Hope to hear from you soon.

Thank you,

Christine

P.S. You are a gift to us crafters, more blessings come to you!

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I’m happy to share. Digi-scrapping is so much fun!

The little tag uses some digital scrapbooking products from Scrap Girls.

The frame is from Keri Schueller’s Vintage Nursery Collection Biggie kit. (You can also buy it in Keri’s Vintage Nursery Embellishment Biggie if you don’t want all the pretty papers in the Biggie.)

The rose paper inside the frame is created using an aged and a floral template from Keri’s Timeless ScrapSimple Paper Templates kit. It comes with detailed instructions on how to create your own papers. The font is Viner Hand ITC.

In Photoshop CS or Photoshop Elements, open your layout. Open the Nursery Frame and use the Move tool to click and drag a copy onto your layout.

Notice, in the Layers palette, that it comes in as a new layer. That allows you to alter it and move it around freely without affecting the rest of your design.

The frame I chose has a green ribbon. I wanted it beige for my layout. To change the color, make sure the layer is active. (The active layer title is the dark one in the Layers palette. To make a layer active, simply click on its title.) Click on Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation.

There are two basic ways to use the Hue/Saturation options. First, you can simply play with the Hue, Saturation and Lightness sliders until you get a look you like.

Try it. It’s really amazing.

Second, if you check mark the Colorize box, the image becomes monochromatic. By sliding the Hue lever left and right, you can select any base color from the color spectrum. This allowed me to make the whole tag a nice creamy color to go with my layout.

Open your choice of paper or create your own using Keri’s Timeless Templates. The standard digital scrapbook paper size is 2 X 12 inches. However I wanted mine smaller to fit into the little nursery frame. Click Image>Image Size and (with Constrain Proportions checked) change one of the 12s to 2. Click OK.

Use the Move tool to click and drag a copy to your layout. Then go back and close your paper file without saving. You don’t want to save the small version you just made and lose the 12 X 12 one!

Back on your layout, move the paper to position it within your frame.

If it disappears behind the frame, it just means the layer needs to be moved up in the Layers palette. The Layers palette is like a stack of papers. Your new layer with the pretty paper on it got slipped somewhere underneath the frame.

Click on its name in the Layers palette and move it up so that it is on top of the frame.

To make the paper fit precisely in the frame, select Edit>Transform>Scale. You now have a bounding box around the paper. Move your cursor over one of the corners until a double arrow appears. Click and hold while you move the corner inward to shrink the paper to size.

To apply the transformation, click on the Move tool and select Apply or simply double-click on the transformed paper itself.

[Photoshop will not let you proceed until the transformation is applied or cleared. Sometimes people get stuck and think Photoshop has stopped working because it won’t let them do anything, when the only problem is they didn’t apply a transformation!]

Select the Type tool and your desired font and color. Type your message. Click on the Move tool to position it within the frame. If the size needs adjusting, use Edit>Transform>Scale again.

At this point, your digital tag is complete but it may not hang exactly as you wish. I wanted mine to appear as if it was hanging from the rose’s stem.

With the text layer selected, click on Layer>Group Layers. Click on the “Group 1” title and change it to something descriptive like “Tag”.

The group only contains your text. Find the paper layer and drag it into the Tag group under the text. Then bring the frame in under the paper. Now you can move the Tag group as a whole and resize or rotate it using the Edit>Transform> commands.

One final little trick …

If you zoom in close on the digital tag, you’ll see that it is just sitting on top of your layout. It’s not really hanging on anything.

If you have something to hang it from – like my rose stem, picture how that would actually look. You wouldn’t see all of the little ribbon. Part of it would be hidden by the stem as the ribbon looped over it.

Using the Opacity slider on the top of the Layers palette, reduce the opacity of the Tag group until you can see the rose stem (or whatever) underneath.

Use the Eraser tool to erase the part of the ribbon which would be hidden.

I lied … one more trick …

To make your digital tag look three-dimensional, make the frame the active layer and click on the scripty “f” at the bottom of the Layers palette. Choose Drop Shadow.

Black is the default color and is usually too stark. If you study real shadows, you will see that they are shades of the color being thrown off by the object creating the shadow. Usually they will be gray with just a hint of the object’s color.

Click on the black color chip to select something more suitable. You can frequently leave the default values for Distance, Spread and Size; but playing with the sliders is fun and can often give an even more realistic look.

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