I want to try my hand at making some papers and things, and I have a couple of photos of flowers I'd like to encorporate into my papers. I'm going through tuts and still haven't figured out what exactly the difference is between them, how they're made, used, etc.

Can someone please explain to me, a newbie to the creative side, how it all works? I THINK brushes are usually black and generally used in the background for textures....right? I really want to try this and I'm SO curious!

BTW I use DIP, and have also just started using PSE so help in either area is fine.
TIA!!!

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perkidawn
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The word "stamp" is often used to describe how brushes are used for both Photoshop (PS) and Photoshop Elements (PSE) because the result can look like using a physical rubber stamp and ink. You can of course do much more, but they will give that one color look based on the foreground color that is set.

There are other programs that may call them stamps. I'm not sure on the effect, but it might be ful color. I know that Paint Shop Pro has what they call "tubes" which are full color and sometimes get referred to as stamps.

But, to get back to PS and PSE - the brushes are grayscale and applied as a single color, and the color will adjust based on the gray in the brush. If you make a brush from your flower, it will not be just black/white - it will have shades of gray and the result on your paper will show more color for the black areas, and less for the gray areas.

Hope this made sense.

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Nancy


"The Eyes Have It"

Okay, yes it sort of did make sense! LOL. Now, how would I turn my pretty flower INTO a brush? I've looked for a tutorial but I found only one on making a stamp. While that would be good for the color effect, I would like to do it (as you said) grayscale to act as any other brush I've seen. Is there a tutorial for DIP or PSE or is there just a basic 'you just have to use .... effect' ?? Change it to black & white and then make it semi-transparent?? I'm just guessing here!!

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perkidawn
Happy 2008! My goals for the year:
*Count my points (WW)
*Do 5 layouts a week
*Plan menus for dinners and stick with them

Being a Mom is the greatest calling God has given me.
Stop by my Blog!

Here is a tut I found...I believe since you are starting out with a colored picture, you will want to convert it to greyscale first. Linkaroo: http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pse...ustombrush.htm

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Creating a brush from a photo is basically a 3-step process. First you'll want to eliminate any distracting background so you'll have just the flower to work with. Othwise it will have the sharp, straight edges of your image.

Here's a link to a tutorial on eliminating backgrounds in PSE

Eliminating Backgrounds

The next step is to create your brush, and lastly, you'll want to save it on your hard drive. This second tutorial is also for PSE and covers these steps.

Creating a Brush

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Nancy


"The Eyes Have It"

Actually you shouldn't need to convert it to grayscale first because Elements will turn it grayscale when you Edit>Define the brush.

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Nancy


"The Eyes Have It"

And for DIP you can use this tutorial http://scrapbook-bytes.com/cgi-scrip...icle_359.shtml

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Thank you both! I'll jump into this tomorrow!!

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perkidawn
Happy 2008! My goals for the year:
*Count my points (WW)
*Do 5 layouts a week
*Plan menus for dinners and stick with them

Being a Mom is the greatest calling God has given me.
Stop by my Blog!