Saturday Special 12/20/08: Blending

Natasha (bcnatty) here bringing you this week’s Saturday Special. Today we are going to delve in to the wonderful, mysterious world of blending. Now, I am by no means an expert in this topic, but I have used this technique to save some pretty bad pictures.

I’m going to run you through the process by which I go through when I am blending. Please keep in mind that there are endless possibilities when using this technique and I challenge you to work your own magic!! Unfortunately, or fortunately for some, I am using PSCS3, and I’m not sure if all of this will translate to other programs.

So, without further ado…

Here is the picture I am trying to save…

In most cases this picture is SO not worthy of scrapping…it’s cute, but her face is really blurry. BUT I love the feel of this pic and how she is holding the ornament…so I’m going to try to save it…cross your fingers!!

First you want to open your picture in your program and place it on a new document. Please make sure that you are not working with your original picture!!

Now you choose your paper. In most cases when I am blending, I want the focus to be on the picture. So I usually choose a very simple textured solid paper (but you can certainly use any paper you’d like). For this example I choose a beautiful paper from Britt-ish Designs and De Crow Designs Very Merry Kit. Drag your paper on to the new document, then go to your layers palette and drag your paper layer so it’s under your photo. Here is what your document should look like now.

The next thing I usually do is make my picture lighter. I do this by right clicking the picture layer and choosing Duplicate Layer. On your layers palette, you should see a field that is defaulted to Normal. Click on the drop down menu and choose Screen. You should definitely see your picture brighten up a bit. If you are working with a darker picture, you could choose to perform this step again to lighten your picture even more. Since mine is already light to begin with, I am only doing this step once. Here’s what my document is looking like so far.

Next you want to merge the picture layers. You do this by clicking on the top picture layer, holding down the shift key and then clicking on the bottom layer. All your picture layers should be highlighted now. Right click anywhere on the highlighted area and choose Merge Layers.

Now comes the fun blending part, we now have one picture layer that we are going to blend with the paper layer behind it. You can play around with the blending modes and see which one works best for your picture. In this case, the Overlay mode created the feeling I wanted. And to create a visual impact I chose to enlarge my picture. You can do this by going to your menu bar, clicking Edit, then Transform, then Scale. Make sure the you hold down the Shift key when you drag to enlarge your picture, that way it will keep the proportions right. Here is what my document looks like now.

Now, I liked the blend and the size of the picture, but the colour was just a little too yellow-ish for me. So I played around with the Levels. I did this by making sure the picture layer was highlighted, then went up to my menu bar and chose Image, then Adjustments, then Levels. You can play around with the sliders until you achieve the look you want. I added just a little more blue to even out the colours. Then all you have to do is add the elements and/or word art you like and Voila! You’ve created a beautiful blended masterpiece!! Here is my final result…

And here are a few other LOs I’ve created using a blending technique.

And here are some beautiful examples from our wonderful CT to inspire you!!

Can’t wait to see all the wonderful blends in the gallery!! Happy Scrapping:)

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 20th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under ScrapMatters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.