Create a brush from a photo in Photo Editor

Well, if you’ve been following my series on using brushes in Photo Editor then you’ve been playing with making brushes from simple shapes and converting your ABR files from other software programs.  Let’s do something a little more creative and make a brush from one of our own photos.  The beauty of this technique is that you can make a totally fabulous brush from a not so great photo. 

So the first thing you want to do is choose a photo.  You’re going to be doing an extraction so find one where the background isn’t too complicated or with some simple outlines for the subject.  Here’s a great tutorial for doing an extraction.  I like to use the polygon lasso tool.

After you’ve cleared out the background and cropped your subject you’ll need to make three adjustments to your picture. 

1. Convert it to gray scale by going to Adjustments|Color|Gray Scale. 

2. Increase the contrast.  You might also want to increase or decrease the brightness depending on the photo.  Go to Adjustment|Light|Brightness/Contrast and adjust the sliders to that you have a crisp picture without losing too much detail.  See how much clearer the differences between the highlights and shadows look before and after my adjustments? 

3. The last adjustment is called Posterize and you can find it under Adjustments|Color|Posterize.  Set your posterize adjustment to 5 or 6 levels and click OK.  Now you’re ready for the magic!  We’re going to do our 3-step process on your newly adjusted extraction so select your paintbrush tool and let’s go!

1. Double-click on the thumbnail in the object palette

2. CTRL-A to select all (or use the menu option Image|Selection|Select All Pixels.)

3. click on Saved Brushes|open the fly-out menu|Define Brush.  Grab yourself an empty canvas, choose a paint color, and have fun playing with your new photo brush!  Here are some layouts I created using my photo brushes:

So your Thursday challenge is to create a brush from a photo and then post a layout using your brush.  I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Artwork credits for Viva Las Vegas: paper by Deanna Tafoya; alpha by Tamara Burwick and for Stitches: Paper, chain, and gems by Gisella; glass frame by Liz Pike; glass bubble by Jennilyn; and antique textiles by myself.

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ACDSee Photo Editor 2008

Announcing ACDSee’s Digital Scrapbooking Software

Friendly, Fast & Powerful!

Download it HERE!

We are so excited about all the new features. Many are specifically for digital scrapbookers!

Here’s what Anna Aspnes of Digital Scrapbooking Magazine thought after a sneak preview at CHA:

ACDSee are also preparing to release a new version of their Photo Editor later this year which could, dare I say it, rival the capabilities of Photoshop Elements.

We have complete details about the new features & videos here

And ACDSee wants to hear what your ideas are. This is a beta which means that it’s not the final product. You will be able to try out the software for an extended period of time. We hope that you will provide ideas & feedback. These will be incorporated into the final product. You can post your ideas at the ACDSee Product Forums.

Existing features that make ACDSee Photo Editor unique are:

• layers are not complicated
• text on a path that is really easy
• grouping objects simplifies many tasks & items can be adjusted within a grouping
• vignettes create soft blended edges around your photos & papers
• not a memory hog (as all ACDSee products are lightweight)

In addition, ACDSee Photo Editor 2008 includes:

• Advanced journaling & text curving options
• Simplified process for using your favorite papers & photos in templates
• Artistic effects can be added, modified & deleted at any time
• Advanced printing options to ensure that your project turns out as you expected
• Use of abr brushes and create brushes from png’s and any image you choose

Download it HERE! and tell us what you think

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The In’s and Out’s of Photo Editor- Week 2

Hi everyone! Liz is back with another challenge for ACDSee Photo Editor. I’m going to utilize some of the tutorials we already have here at DigiScrapInfo so we can get to know this program better.

First off, did you see this post?

ACDSee invites you to help build ACDSee Photo Editor 2008!

I’m so excited- we’re all going to be able to give input! So if you don’t have ACDSee Photo Editor yet, you can wait until the 25th and you can download the beta, or download a 30 day trial of our current version. Then we’ll post challenges here every week so you can work your way around the program. Isn’t that exciting! The good news is, you’ll be able to play with it for 90 days!

Anyway, let’s move on to the challenge. If you currently have ACDSee Photo Editor, please feel free to jump right in. If not, wait until the 25th and download it then so you can play along!

We’re going to focus on drop shadows today. They are an integral part of a digital layout. My goal is to make my digital layout look like it was done as a paper layout. A good way to help with that is drop shadows.

I LOVE shadows in Photo Editor. They are done on a separate layer, so you can manipulate them as much as you want! I think they look realistic, but I admit, it took me a few layouts to get a good groove going. So I’ll share the settings I use at the end.

Here is the tutorial we will be using:

Drop Shadows with ACDSee Photo Editor

Here are some examples I’ve done:

A few tips that I’ve learned. I am by no means an expert on this, and I’m sure most of you already know this, but we cater to everybody- new user, or very experienced, so I’ll post it anyway.

When working with drop shadows I have used this tip as a general guide. The closer you want your element to appear “attached” to the paper, the smaller a shadow to use. For example, I put a very small shadow on pictures, background paper, and small elements, but use a larger shadow for things like flowers, ribbons, and frames. Here are some excellent tutorials regarding shadows from Digital Scrapbook Place.

Digital Realism: The Shadow Knows

Shadows and Perspective

These helped me tremendously when starting out.

Anyway, I want to see some layouts with some cool shadow tricks. Post a link in the comments section to your layout, and feel free to let me know what settings you used, any tips and tricks you discovered, etc.

Here are my settings:

I almost always use the same shade, and vary the opacity. Unless I’m working with a dark background, I will usually go to R48, G48, B48 or 303030, which is a dark gray. If I’m using a dark background, I will usually use black. I adjust the opacity down to between 60-80%, depending on what I’m using it for.

For Photo mats, photos, background papers, and small elements such as glitter, buttons, etc:

Offset- 8-12, Blur- 4-5, Opacity- 80%

For frames, cardboard, etc:

Offset- 13-16, Blur- 9-10, Opacity- 75-80%

For Ribbons, flowers, and big shadows:

Offset- 17+, depending on what I want, Blur- 11+- again, depending on what I want, Opacity- 60-75%

Feel free to play with them and come up with your own! I admit, I haven’t played with them a lot, but it is fun once you get the hang of it. I’m pleased with how mine turn out in print. They look realistic enough to me.

Thanks for playing! See you next week!

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ACDSee invites you to help build ACDSee Photo Editor 2008

I can finally share the most exciting news! As you know, ACDSee has been listening to what digiscrappers want. Many love using ACDSee Photo Manager for organizing their supplies. We started with ACDSee 9 and after listening to the feedback, ACDSee added new features to make ACDSee 10 more helpful to us. ACDSee 10 can view abr brushes & extract zipped files within ACDSee.

Now ACDSee is inviting YOU to help build ACDSee’s digiscrapping software! It will have many new features that digiscrappers will love. Many of us scrap in ACDSee Photo Editor 4 because it doesn’t have a high learning curve & it has some great features that make it user friendly. Existing features that make it unique are:

• layers are not complicated
• text on a path that is really easy
• grouping objects simplifies many tasks & items can be adjusted within a grouping
• vignettes create soft blended edges around your photos & papers
• not a memory hog (as all ACDSee products are lightweight)

In addition, ACDSee Photo Editor 2008 will include:

• Advanced journaling & text curving options
• Simplified process for using your favorite papers & photos in templates
• Artistic effects can be added, modified & deleted at any time
• Advanced printing options to ensure that your project turns out as you expected
• Use of abr brushes and create brushes from png’s and any image you choose

So how can you try out ACDSee Photo Editor 2008?

• On February 25th, you will be able to download it.
• We will post a link here on the blog
• Post your feedback in the ACDSee forums (link will be provided)

ACDSee will be gathering the information & using it as they create the final product.

Heidi will be creating videos on the new features. The ACDSee team will be providing tips here on the blog. You’ll definitely want to try the new version of ACDSee Photo Editor 2008. And ACDSee wants to hear what you think!

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The In’s and Out’s of Photo Editor- Week 1

Hi everyone! This is Liz and I will be helping you get to know our Photo Editing Program- ACDSee Photo Editor. Every week either Kristi or I will be presenting you with a different tutorial and challenge. Because I still have a lot to learn as well, I will be participating right along with you.

When I first tried ACDSee Photo Editor, I had already been using ACDSee Photo Manager 9 for a while to organize my supplies, and was very happy with it. I started digiscrapping with Photoshop 6.0. It was an old version, even in 2006. I loved the concept of digiscrapping, but was having a very hard time with the learning curve of Photoshop, and an even harder time with finding help for my version. The program would crash if I had other programs open, and was just a frustrating experience in general. When I found out that ACDSee had a scrapbooking program, I was definitely intrigued. I jumped on the forums at DigiScrapInfo and bombarded Heidi and Connie with question after question. Once my new 160GB hard drive came in, I downloaded the trial, found the tutorials and started reading. I was able to create 2 pages that night, with no troubles at all. I was hooked from Day 1.

Many people already have a program that they use for scrapbooking. That is ok. But I would love for you to try this program out and see how it compares. Every day we discover something else about this program that we love. If you don’t currently have this program, feel free to download the trial and play with it for 30 days!

Today we’re going to focus on selective photo recolorization. I recently learned this from the tutorial and was amazed at how easy it was to recolor part of a black and white photo. The results are very elegant, and a stand out technique.

Here’s the link to the tutorial that we will be using:

Color Isolation in Photos using ACDSee Photo Editor

Post back your results with a link to it in the comment section of this blog. Feel free to make a layout with it, like I did, or just show me the picture by itself. And since we’re constantly trying to improve things for you, I’d love to hear some feedback from you as well as far as how easy it was, if you have ever tried it on another program, etc.

Here’s what I came up with using this tutorial: (Image is also linked to my gallery for credits)

Notice the hydrangea is colored while the rest of the photo is black and white. I also reduced the opacity on the top layer to 85% for a softer effect. I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

I can’t wait to see all the fabulous photos you come up with! Then, check back next Thursday for a new tutorial!

-Liz

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Organizational Challenge: Week Six

Perhaps I should call this Week 5-A. Or Week 5 Redo? Either way, I am reporting on my tasks that I assigned to myself on Week Four.Tasks for Week 4/5:
1. Back up and Optimize– Done! This one is easy. Has it become a natural habit for you as well?
2. If you use Photo Manager to view fonts, set up a system to keep you better organized. This was mostly done prior to this week, but I was able to work on getting some neater categories. I found the hardest part was deciding what fonts went into which folder.
3. If you find fonts that you know you will never use, have duplicate fonts or corrupted fonts, delete them and don’t look back! Whew! I really had a hard time, but I did find some that I was able to delete. It felt good- kind of like when you toss all of those “single” socks. and now I don’t have to look at them anymore!
4. If you have any credit information on these fonts, go ahead and put that information in the Caption or Notes section.

TIP: Try to get into the habit of doing this as soon as you download a font. Unfortunately, I has many credit files floating around, but I don’t know what fonts belong to them. It is going to take some hard detective work to figure this all out.

5. Check to see how many back-up files you have and delete as many as you feel comfortable. Done!

Ok- so it took me an extra week, but what is most important is that we don’t give up. Better to take an extra week to catch up than stop organizing completely and then fall way behind.
So are we ready to move on? I am!
I am glad that I am doing this as a “real” person- like all of you are. I’m a working mom with outside situations that take over a bit. Life isn’t perfect, life is busy and hectic- life throws us a lot of curves. This series in organizing it helping me- and hopefully you- to realize that it is easier to work around the craziness and accept it is for what it is.
Now who would have thought ACDSee and scrapping could be so Zen?
I had two separate tasks that I wanted to work on this week, one is a bit more complicated and time consuming than the other. I had planned to clean up our Alpha Files, and to begin organizing our Brushes. I am getting 4 impacted wisdom teeth removed on Tuesday and I think that trying to accomplish both goals in one week is biting off more than I can chew- no pun intended!
So let’s focus on our Alphas, and next week we can focus on the brushes. No stress allowed!

One thing that I did when I first started out with Photo Manager was to tag all of my Alpha files as “Alphas.” When I only had a few alpha sets, t was no big deal. but now- a year later, I really don’t need to see every letter of every alpha when I search for them using the Organize Pane.

To find everything that is tagged alpha, go to your Organize Pane, select the category Alpha. If you have sub-folders, you should also include them as well. To do this, go to the top of the Organize Pane, click on Match Any/All and select the Include Sub-Categories. If it is grayed out, you’ll need to select Alpha first.

When you have all of your alphas showing, scroll through the thumbnails. When you come to an alpha that is showing all of the letter files, right click on one of them and select Go To File. This brings you to the folder where they are located. Select All (Ctrl-A) and deselect the “A” file. (Ctrl-Click).
Go to the Properties pane, and uncheck the tags you had for them. This leaves just the “A” file with any alpha tags associated with it. To back to the previous window, click the Back button on the top left of your screen. F5 will refresh the screen.

TIP: Some Alphas have numbers. If this is the case, deselect the “A” File and one of the number files, I use the “1″ file.

Some scrappers prefer to have a preview or contact sheet for their alphas.That is easy enough to do with Photo Manager: Creating your own preview with ACDSee Photo Manager

Another way to help with searching for alphas is to have them tagged into styles/sub-categories. This image shows the sub-categories I have for my alphas:

You can obviously add in however many sub-categories as you want and need.
For DigiscrapInfo’s Tutorial on Organizing Alphas, read here.
Our Homework for this week is this:

1. Back up and Optimize
2. Clean up alphas- so that only one letter or contact sheet/preview comes up in a search
3. Create sub-categories and tag Alphas

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Convert your existing brushes to use with ACDSee Photo Editor

In my last tutorial, we learned how to create a brush from simple image file.  In my examples I used some cookie cutter shapes that come with Photo Editor which are a great creative tool already at your fingertips.  But now you might be interested in utilizing the brush files you already own or plan to purchase.  ACDSee’s Photo Editor can convert any type of brush file that you can view using Photo Manager.  So let’s learn how to convert them in Photo Editor, your cross-platform creative tool for creating and using brushes!

First, let’s review the basic three steps you used to define a brush: double-click on the thumbnail, CTRL-A to select, then Saved Brushes|open the fly-out menu|Define Brush.  Now let’s open an ABR file as if it’s a regular image file.  You can use CTRL-E from Photo Manager or just browse to your file location using the Add Images button on the image basket.  I have Swish Two by Lori Wiley open in my Photo Editor.  (Important note: open it from the file menu, image basket or directly from PM.  Do not attempt to load brush in the brushes menu.)

1. When you open the file you’ll notice all the brushes are on separate object layers and the images are reversed so we need to invert them.  So select all of the objects in the object palette and go to Adjustments|Color|Invert.

2. Working one object at a time, do your three-steps to define each brush.  Double-click on the thumbnail, select all (CTRL-A), then choose Define Brush. 

3. Once each brush is defined you can click on the eye icon to hide that object (make it invisible) as you work your way through all the images.

4. Be sure to save the set when you are finished so you can load them from the Saved Brushes fly-out menu the next time you want to work with them.  (Important note: all brushes visible in the Saved Brushes menu will be saved in your new brush file so you may want to delete the default brushes from the list.  Just use that fly-out menu and choose Delete Brush from the menu.)  And don’t forget to tag your new PE brush file in Photo Manager!

This procedure works on any type of brush file that you can view using Photo Manager.  Simply open it from the image basket, convert each brush image, then save as a new brush file for easy loading later.  It’s important to recognize your photo editor brush files since they have the ABR file extension but are different from other program ABR files.  I like to name my converted brushes with the filename of the original and add ‘_PE’ at the end but any system you choose to designate your PE-type brush files will work fine.

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Organizational Challenge: Week Five

I have a confession to make. This past week, I was a bad scrapper/organizer. At first, I was going to write about how much I had gotten done, because how can I help all of you get organized, if I can’t help myself? But you know what? Not only would that be dishonest, which I don’t like, it doesn’t help anyone with the reality that life sometimes gets in the way of our own best intentions. It does, and we have to be ok with that. In parenting, we would call this a “teachable moment.”

Let’s take a look at my tasks I had wanted to work on from last week:

Tasks for Week 4:
1. Back up and Optimize
2. If you use Photo Manager to view fonts, set up a system to keep you better organized.
3. If you find fonts that you know you will never use, have duplicate fonts or corrupted fonts, delete them and don’t look back!
4. If you have any credit information on these fonts, go ahead and put that information in the Caption or Notes section.
5. Check to see how many back- up files you have and delete as many as you feel comfortable.

I did back up and optimize. And I did work on tagging some things that I had running loose in my _To Be Tagged Folder. So all is not lost. But other than that- a big ol’ nothing.

Since I didn’t get to do any of the other tasks, I have them on my list for this week. If you did these, then you can continue “fine tuning” the rest of your stash. Perhaps you still have some categories that need to be cleaned up- go ahead and work on that. Or if you are still tagging your stash, shoot for 20-30 minutes a day, instead of the 15 minutes we had been doing.

Scrapping is supposed to be a fun, relaxing hobby. It is not supposed to be one more thing for us to beat ourselves up over, right? Right! So go to it, use this week to catch yourselves up- and definitely use some time to scrap!

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Define a Brush in Photo Editor

Well, I’ve been having fun discovering lots of creative tools in Photo Editor and I thought I’d show you how to create your own brushes.  So let’s get started!  The first thing you need is a png file you would like to turn into a brush.  I have a simple heart shape open in photo editor and I’ve selected my brush tool in the toolbar.

1. In your object palette, double click on the thumbnail of your image.

2. Select the entire layer using CTRL-A or go to Image|Selection|Select all Pixels.  You should now have ‘marching ants’ around your image and crop marks in the corners.

3. Click on the Saved Brushes button on the toolbar for the paintbrush tool.  Notice the small menu button on the right side?  Click on that to find the brush menu.

4. Choose Define brush from the fly-out menu.

You can now make, save, load, and delete brushes. 

You can always return to the default set that came pre-loaded by choosing ‘Reset Brushes’. 

One important note: you can only use the ‘load brushes’ feature with .abr files created in Photo Editor.  Not to worry, though…we’ll cover how to convert your other .abr files next!

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Using ACDSee Photo Editor to do Quick Pages

Doing Quick Pages with ACDSee Photo Editor isn’t totally straightforward, but it is easy!

1. Open up your APD file:
2. Select all image objects.
3. Choose Adjustments | Light | Threshold…
4. Change the Threshold to 100 and click OK.
5. You should now have black pictures on your layout:
6. Select all objects and choose Object | Convert to Image (Render)
7. Select the Magic Wand.
   1. Change the settings to Tolerance 1 px and uncheck “Select Color Through Image”
   2. Click on first black image.
   3. Hit delete
   4. Click on every other image square and hit delete.
8. And you are left with a Quick Page with no images.
9. Save as a png file.

Note: The one time you may have issues with this method is if there was a black thing next to your photos. Then in the threshold step, change the threshold to 0, to get white blocks to delete. And hopefully you don’t have pure black and white elements next to your images. Then this method may not work.

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