Basic Tips on Digital Scrapbooking 2Often times a designer of a kit wants you to have total creative control when creating layouts, so embellishments (elements) sometimes come really huge in size. When you drag & drop your element onto a page you can the resize it to suit what you want. It is better to have it too big, rather than too small… better output for printing.
Lingo & Some Groovy Tools to get to Know:Drop Shadows – we talked about this before. It gives depth and a sense of 3D to your layouts. You can play the colour of the drop shadow… the opacity and even the ‘grain’ in some programs to make it blend. Some elements come with drop shadows included, most don’t. Make this tool your friend.
Inner Shadow – most upper quality imaging programs allow you to put a shadow on the inside of your element. Again, like the drop shadow you can change the colour to match the element just slightly darker to give it that shadow play effect. Some programs even offer the ability to put in a grainy effect on this to really blend into the element.
Bevel & Emboss – this gives a 3D effect. Raises it from the ‘canvas’ to appear 3D, automatically putting in an Inner Shadow and an Inner Glow at the same time. Most programs again will allow you to change the colour of your shadow & highlights. Most programs automatically default these colours to straight Black & White (black for the shadow & white for the highlight)… sometimes they come off too strong. So play around with it. Change the colour of the highlight to the brightest spot on your element or from another part of your layout and do the same choosing the darkest spot for the shadow. Some programs even allow you to change the shape of the bevel… hard & chiseled …. Round & Soft… etc. You can also play with the height & depth of the bevel. Don’t be afraid to play with the sliders in tool pop-up window. You can always hit cancel and it will default back to its original settings.
Inner Glow – give you the chance to brighten the inside edge of your element. There are choices in some programs for distance, choke and size… play with these and you’ll see what they do (for explanation of terms… see below.)
Outer Glow – brightens the outside edge of your element. Again, you can change colour, range of the glow and even make it grainy to blend in.
Meaning of Distance, Choke/Spread & Size – these are all options in creating Drop Shadows, Inner Shadows, Outer Glow, Inner Glow in Adobe Photoshop. Other programs may use other terms but often offer the same kind of effects.
Distance, literally means how far you want the effect to stretch from your element. It is slave to the shape of your element, plus the ‘Size’ you currently have it set at. Giving you the option to stretch the entire shadow from element itself… such as…
This works wonderfully for text as well.
Choke/Spread – means to tightness of the shadow from its beginning point. The outline of your element. It will hold tight the shadow (solid) to what number you put it at… for 3 pixels… or 5 or 10 for a real solid look. (Most go up to a 100 pixels… but now you’re just been funny. LOL)
Size (yes, it does matter) – will determine how far the spread of your effect will take. It ‘fans’ out the shadow/glow particles to the pixels you set for it. Zero is really tight with no fanning… 5 is softer…. 10 softer still… 100 is barely visible, but you will see that the area on your layout is a little darker or lighter depending if you’re using Shadow or Glow. Be wary when adding drop shadows to semi-transparent elements, as it will add a shadow to the whole thing.
Have fun!!
October 22, 2004, 08:10:09 PM
