Digi Tips Week... Day 2

Welcome to day 2 of my digi tips week.
First, I thought I'd offer a downloadable PDF of yesterday's tutorial.  HERE is a link to the file.  You should be able to download and print it if you wish.  Let me know if you find this useful and I'll do the same with today's information.
Today I'm going to talk about simple recolouring and layering of digital stamps.

I am working with Word 2008 - I am not sure if these features are available with earlier versions...

First, I imported the Old Letter Writing stamp into my word document.  Now, for my card, I decided I wanted a watermark effect in the background.  Altering the image to sepia and printing on kraft gives this effect. (And I love it!!)  So, format the picture, and click on 'Recolor'.  Choose Sepia from the drop down menu.  You can then alter the colour further by playing with the Brightness, Contrast and Transparency.

Alternatively, you can do this in Photoshop.  I am using Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Once you've opened the image go to Image, then Adjustments, then Hue/Saturation:

Click in the Presets box and select Sepia from the drop down menu.

If you want to make it lighter, play with the Lightness:

Back to the Word document...
I resized the image to fit a Hero Arts 5 1/2 x 4 1/4" notecard.

Then I imported my 2 birds. both from the Bird Flourish Thanks digikit.  As you can see, the originals are huge, and coloured.  I need to recolour and resize them for my card.

So first, I went to format picture, and I played with the brightness - altering it to -100%. This made the bird black.

After resizing it, using the same method as described above, I clicked Layout and changed the image to In Front of Text.  This is necessary for layering one stamp over another.

I repeated the process with the other bird and the sentiment, moving them around on the page until I was satisfied.  This is another pro of digi stamping - no wasted paper due to wonky stamping or mis-judgements. :)

Once satisfied, I printed onto kraft card.
So very simple :)
Oh, and make sure you leave it to dry for a while before stitching or distressing etc.  The ink can run otherwise which is really annoying!!

And here is the finished card featuring Old Letter Writing, Respondez Vous and Bird Flourish Thanks.  I embellished it with Hero Arts pearls, lovely silky crush ribbon and some pretty pins from The Ribbon Girl.

I hope someone somewhere finds some use for this. :)
Back soon with more. Let me know if you have any questions.  I am compiling them for later in the week :)

Supplies

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