**Program Tutorials** : Photoshop : *NEW

There are many colors and textures that can be applied to stamps, brushes, and edgings. This tutorial will show you how to get started with stamps, using layer styles and patterns.
A stamp is placed in a Photoshop file on it’s own layer. The example on the left shows two stamps placed in Photoshop, the large swirl and the second is the lacey pattern, white in the right example. It does not matter what color a stamp is, the colors and textures will be applied to the stamp in layer styles, and can be adjusted at any time.

NOTE: you can apply all the following steps together, they are shown separately in the tutorial.
For this tutorial, the large swirl (stamp) is placed in Photoshop, appearing black before changes are applied.

In the layers palette, double click on the stamp layer and the layer styles menu will pop up. Chose Color Overlay. In the Color Overlay Menu, click on the small bar, which will allow you to chose a new color. Numbers can be entered manually, or picked with the dropper. Clicking ok will finalize, or you can add more styles.

Now the swirl is a light teal color.

In the layer style palette, select Bevel and Emboss. The size was set at 8 pixels for the tutorial. This will create a highlight and a shadow, making it pop up from the page a bit. The number is a bit higher so the final look is thick and has texture. For the white lace, the setting is 1, for a slight pop, 1-3 is great for brush strokes.

Example with Color Overlay and Emboss applied.

Contour was applied, but is not necessary for the desired style.
Select texture under bevel and emboss. There are several default textures in Photoshop. If you click on the bar with arrow, the options will show. The pattern used in the tutorial was Molecular.

Playing with the scale will affect the repeating patterns scale on your shape, 162% was used in the tutorial.

Here’s what the texture looks like up close.

The Dropshadow usually needs to be lower, since we are adding a shadow to something that would be barely off the page. The white lace has a dropshadow of 1 pixel at 25% opacity, anything else became overpowering.
For the swirl, it was set to three pixels at 50% opacity.

The swirl with a drop shadow applied.

A final page is shown as an example for the uses of stamps and textures.

Thank You to Carrie Stephens for allowing the use of her Oooh-la-lah! kit and Balance kit for this tutorial.

© Copyright 2003-2005 by Scrapbook-Bytes; & original creator/s of tutorials/articles

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