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Rangefinder
Magazine Rƒ Cookbook by Deborah Lynn Ferro
Creating a variety of pages for the digital album can be a challenge, coming up with different artistic designs that stand out from all the standard templates available. But where do you start in the design process? Photoshop has created design actions called styles, that, with one click of the mouse, will save you hours of time and make you look like “DaVinci.” The following steps were used to create this collage of the bride getting ready. All the color effects, including the black-and-white conversion, were done using Photoshop’s layer styles. 1) Create a black background for your collage by going to File>New. 2) With black selected as your background color, determine the size and resolution of your background. (For this example the size is 10x10 in. and the resolution is 250 ppi.) 3) This collage includes 9 images cropped to 3x3 in. at 250 ppi resolution. (When making a collage, the resolution of your images should be the same.) 4) Each 3x3 image should be color corrected, retouched, flattened images in RGB mode. 5) Add a grid to your background by going to View>Show>Grid. 6) With the Move Tool, drag each 3x3 image over one at a time and line them up on the grid. You will have to maximize your window and zoom-in to be sure that the images are properly aligned. To activate a layer to move it, with the Move Tool active, hold your cursor over the image you want to move, holding your “Ctrl.” key down for the PC (Command key for the Mac), left click to activate the layer. (After each image has been aligned, you can remove the grid by going to View>Show>None.) 7) To change the color and effect of each image, go to the Styles Folder in Photoshop 7’s Color Palette. You will need to load styles by going to the folder’s options that are located in the arrow at the right of your styles folder. Load any of the styles that you would use. (I also prefer to have my styles in text only so I can read what specific effect it is rendering. You can change to “Text Only” in the options menu. 8) Activate the image you want to change and click on a style to change it. The change is immediate and you can change the style by clicking on another style. It automatically deletes the last style and adds the new one. (The styles for this collage were loaded from the Photographic Effects & Image Effects folders.) Continue with each image until you have achieved the desired result. 9) At this point you can also change the color of your background. Click on your background in the Layers Palette to activate it. Double click on the foreground color in the Tools Palette to change the foreground color. Once you have selected your color, go to edit>fill. 10) Save your collage as a PSD, (Photoshop document), to enable you to make any future changes. Remember that Photoshop is supposed to give you
more creative control over your images, but the time it takes to be
creative depends on your
level of experience in Photoshop. Layers Styles not only reduces your
work time but increases your creative design ability. |
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The latest
trend in albums is the custom, digitally designed album. Not only
does it offer the client a more artistically designed album that
can include a variety of text, artistic effects and color, but it
also produces an album that is one of a kind. With more and more
photographers learning Photoshop, the ability to offer these albums
and to design them in-house greatly increases. With a digitally designed
album, mats with inserted images that are the standard in a traditional
album are replaced with images that serve as backgrounds and colorful
collages, bringing new visual excitement to the contemporary bride.