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From YourSITE.com *Element Ok if you followed my Making Wire Tutorial in last months Ezine here is the 2nd part of placing jewels, gems and beads on the wire you learned how to create CLICK HERE TO VIEW  If you search through google and royalty photography sites you can find many beads and gems. Take photo’s or scans of your own strands of costume beads, I have examples shown below of photo’s that I took and extracted beads from the strand. I have to say you can make all the digitally created beads and baubles that you want to in PSP using a variety of ways. Those topics have been discussed to death in other tutorials across the web. So for this one I am using mainly real photographed gems and trinkets. NOTE: You can use the Warp brush to change the shapes of your beads, and the Emboss brush to create the illusion of the wire going through the middle of your glass beads.  So the first thing we need is a new image, make it whatever size you need to fit your wire on it with extra playroom. The first layer I fill with a white so I can see what I am doing. Create a new layer and either place your wire on it or create a new one. This one is easy only 1 layer for my glass tube beads and I just placed them along my wire. These tubes are wonderful and don’t have a drop-shadow added to them. They also have a transparency so that the wire shows through automatically. I am sorry to say I don’t know where these came from, they have no name except glass_beads which makes me think they might be a default tube from the PSP resource files.  Ok let’s get a little bit more creative remember to add new layers, as you need them. I only created a small length of beads on my wire for this tutorial. You would most likely create a full strand or a complete shaped wire of beads. Open your image that contains your beads and using your selection tool, select the bead you want and copy it. Go back to your wire image and paste as new layer or duplicate. Keep doing this until you get all the beads you want on your wire. Here is the start of mine, I did three variations and I never beaded in real life so forgive my lack of designing on which beads go together!  Once you have your bead pattern laid out and spaced correctly, it would be smart to make a duplicate copy of your whole image and merge the single bead layers together by types. Ex: I would merge all my B&W beads in the top image then merge all the gold metal beads as another layer. This is just so it is easier to control your layers for the next step. We need to erase/move little areas of the beads like I did on the pink beads, where the wire goes either in or out of the bead.  So grab your Warp Brush to shove or pull those little areas. Keep in mind which direction your beads lay on the wire, whether you would see the hole to the left, the right or both sides. Ex: If you were looking at a real string of beads straight on your would see the string enter the beads on the right side of the beads to the left, neither side of the bead straight on and you would see the hole on the left side of the bead on the right beads. YWIM? And you wouldn’t always see a large spot depending on the shape of your beads.  You will notice that I colorized the B&W beads GREEN, I added a glass effect from Alien Skin Eye Candy 5: Impact. You can use whichever effect or plug-in to achieve whatever look you want. I added a wider drop shadow to my beads and a narrower one to my wire. Ok let’s explore changing our bead layers to Grey Scale and why! You can create a complete bead string and use it over and over again, coloring it to match any of your LO’s as you need. Adjust>Hue and Saturation>Hue 0/ Saturation 0 / lightness adjust this to either lighten or darken your beads.  You will also need to rotate and adjust the size of the beads to fit 1) your string size 2) so they follow the curve of the wire 3) the finished size you want you strand to be. Use the pick/deform tool on the first bead you place on a layer, and then duplicate the layer for a second bead the exact same size. Then adding color from Colorize we get this, we could also change the color of the wire.  This is how important plug-ins are to digital images this was done in Eye Candy 5 Impact in less then 2 minutes! Trust me it is so fun in Eye Candy!  You can achieve very similar effects just using Inner Bevels, adjusting the drop shadow color to match the glass bead. Here is another set of beads that I adjusted grayscale, Manual Color Correction. Again applied the glass effect with Eye Candy. Then played with the Effects: Hot Wax & Chrome. These effects sometimes work better if you duplicate the layer you want to apply the effect to and then adjust the blend modes on the duplicate layer.  Just using the Manual Color Correction I got the colored beads below.  One thing to keep in mind is to create your drop shadow on layers of their own. Do not merge these with your bead layers or the shadow will take on the same color of your beads when you change it later. See how my shadow in the above image is purple. This photo was shot from about 4 feet away from me, the necklace is hanging on my scanner against a white piece of paper and a flash was used.  The better you are with your eraser, magic wand tool and your selection tools (Circle, Eclipse, Rounded Rectangle) the easier it is to remove beads from the strand individually for separate usage on other bead strands. Remember some beads are not always perfect, they have many imperfections like the one farthest to the left which I used the eraser tool to remove the background around the bead.  Another thing to note is that strands of beads rarely have the wire or the string showing. The beads nestle close together they don’t hang out in space like we see so often in the digital bead strands. But it’s fun to play with them both ways! Don’t forget to use your photo enhancement tools, most of them are in the Adjust Menu such as Smart Photo Fix, automatic color enhancement, clarify, color-balance, texture preserve smooth. These will all vary depending on what your photo started out like. © Copyright by YourSITE.com |