Lesson 2

Making a card.

Aim: To learn to use a different selection tool called the Lasso tool. We will also learn how to apply a filter to an image and how to copy effects to different layers.

Im going to cut out a rose, duplicate it to make a heart shape for a Valentine card. You could substitute your own image.

Fig1

Save the rose to your folder. Open it up in Photoshop. It is quite small so you can click on the Magnifying glass tool then click on the image to see it better.

Fig2

Now go to the Lasso tool. Use it to drawn around the edge of the rose. If you make a mistake you will have to go to the Menubar, click on Select , then on deselect and start with the lasso tool again. Once you have selected the rose go to Edit and click on Paste. Now the rose is kept in a temporary scratch folder.

Fig 3

We are going to use an A4 sheet of paper that we will then fold over. Remember an easy way to find out sizes is to click on Print, click on Setup and look through the sizes in the drop-down box, then you can cancel the Print. Now that you have the size of an A4 sheet you can go to File and New. The New box opens up and you can type in the Width, Height, making the resolution 300 pixels/inch.

Note
If you were doing this at home and using expensive photograph paper I would suggest that once the image is made to copy it place the two images next to eachother, print out and then glue them onto card.

Fig 4

Look at the new blank page and using the ruler see where the middle of the page is. You can now drag the mouse from the left ruler to bring a guide to the midway point. When you come to print later guides are ignored by the printer. Use the Rectangular Marque Tool (topleft in the Tool Box) and drag over the right half of the blank page.

Fig 5

Now you can use the Paint Bucket Tool to fill in this rectangle with a colour of your choice. To do this click on the Paint Bucket Tool then on the Colour Picker (top left square below the hand icon in Tool Box) and choose a colour. Click inside the highlighted rectangle. I chose light blue. Now go up to Edit and choose Paste. The rose appears on the image. It is a bit small...that is because we have gone from an image at 72 dpi to a new image at 300 dpi. Go to Edit and select the Transform tool. Scale the rose up a bit.

Fig6

Like in the previous lesson with the flying sheep we will duplicate the rose. Remember , right-click oon the rose in the Layer window and select Duplicate. You can then use the Move Tool (top right in Tool Box) and arrange the different roses to make one half of the heart. As the heart is symmetrical we only have to make one half. Once you have got your heart shape we are going to merge all the roses into one layer. To do this make sure any layers that you do not want to merge have their eye icons clicked off. Now making sure that one of the rose layers is highlighted (it turns blue) click the arrow at the top right of the Layers Window and choose Merge Visible from the drop-down menu. Now all the roses are merged into one layer.

Fig 7

We now duplicate the bunch of roses. To flip the bunch we go to Edit , Transform then choose Flip Horizontal. Move the bunches of roses until you get it looking like a heart. Once you are happy with it , merge the roses together in the same way as before.

Fig 8

We could leave the roses like that but you could have some fun playing around with different filters. Make sure that you select the bunch of roses layer in the Layers Window. Go to the Menubar and then Filter. Try some filters out. I chose Poster Edges.

Fig 9
I added a Be My Valentine text below the rose and gave it a drop shadow by going to Layer, Layer Style, Drop Shadow.

Fig 10

If you look at the text in the Layer Window you can see a small arrow and an f shape. The f shape is to show that you have an effect on the text. You can copy this layer effect to the bunch of roses. Right click on the text layer and choose Copy Layer Style. Now go to the bunch of roses layer, right click and choose Paste Layer Style.

Fig 11

If you click on the small arrow beside the f a menu drops down with a list of the effects. To alter a specific effect double click it and the Layer Style box will open up , letting you adjust the effect.

Fig 12

I also went to the Menubar , chose Image, Adjust and played around with the Saturation slider.

This lesson can be downloaded in word format.

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