CS Blog Hop January 2016 - Celebrate

Happy 2016 everyone.  I know that lots of you got art making goodies for Christmas and are probably enjoying the latest and greatest of everything artsy and scrapbook/stamp.  I for one was really looking forward to getting the Celebrate kit this month and as soon as I saw the kit, I knew that I wanted to do something a bit different for my entry to the blog hop.

Here goes.  I was out walking a while back and came across this delicious plumeria tree which grows in my neighborhood.  Of course, apart from enjoying its wonderful perfume I had to take a photo or two of it.  Here is one of them.

What we are going to do is turn this into an aged monochrome image.  As yet I have no idea what tint I am going to use but will be experimenting for a while to see what works.  Of course, I will give you some step by step instructions but right now it is time to play a bit.  The first step is to create a duplicate layer of the photo so you do not alter the original in any way.  Go to layer>duplicate layer>OK.

Turn off the eyeball in the background layer to hide it.  Next you are going to turn the photo into a black and white image.  There are lots of ways of doing this but the way I do this is go to image>adjustments>blackandwhite>

Once you have done that you end up with a screen that looks like this.

I use PhotoshopCC 2015.  You can see there are all kinds of sliders to play around with.  You will see that the filter is set to default.  If you click the downfacing arrow in the default box, a number of different filters will come up.

These different filters are well worth playing around with until you find one that you like.  For this photo I selected the lighter tab and ended up with a fairly contrasty and well defined black and white photo.

Now open up the bridge with all the components from our gorgeous Celebrate kit (digital version):

I have decided to make this a greyish brown sepia style photo and the brown background from the kit is absolutely the perfect color.  Open the brown background and use the eyedropper tool to select color.  What we are going to do is make a color overlay using this color.

Go to Layer>Layerstyle>coloroverlay>

To make the overlay transparent double click the layer style eyeball in the layers palette.

Here you can see that the opacity is set to 100%.  You can either type in your percentage opacity or use the slider.  In this case I think opacity should be set somewhere between 45% and 55%.  The result is a somewhat softer but still very visible sepia style photo.

Now it is time to build our layout.  As always, make a new file 12" x 12" at 300 ppi.

I have decided to distress the edges of this photo a bit so opened up my bridge and did a search using the word "inked".  What came up was the wonderful pack of Inked Edges that Club Scrap made for us some years ago.

I went ahead and selected one of them and made a new layer on top of the photo.  Also cropped the photo quite dramatically.

Once you have your distressing sorted out you can go ahead and build your layout.

I have started to do this and here is an in between screenshot.

Here is the final layout.

I very much hope you have enjoyed the process here.  This soft style layout is very much outside my comfort zone but I think the photo lends itself well to being converted into a sepia style which is why I felt a soft style would make the photo pop a little.