Designer Technique December 2008 (Something Blue Studios)

I am so happy to be able to introduce to you Danielle Catalano-Titus of Something Blue Studios! When I made a purchase from her store a few months ago, I just KNEW I had to invite her to the Designer Technique so we could get to know her better! Are you as excited as I am?

Besides her own site, I also found a store at a Cherry on Top/or this link (as well as a gallery of layouts utilizing her stuff) and Catscraps.

Check out her blog (but it looks like she is going to have a new one at her site). Visit her gallery at Two Peas. Visit her DST gallery.

Danielle is so inspirational. Check out the fridge flair idea or magnets available at her site. Here entire store seems to be full of resourceful items to create artistic pages. Maybe her jewelry make the perfect gift you are looking for.

I found that she was on the Editorial Board when the Digital Scrapbooking Magazine first came out -- what an honor, huh?

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JOIN DANIELLE IN A CHALLENGE

Win prizes for completing Danielle's challenge for you.

You can find the challenge in the forum thread here.

Each person who participates will receive a 50% off coupon to her store (for digital downloads only, no magnets or jewelry).

One person by random drawing will win a $10 guest coupon to her store!

Wow! What great prizes! Won't you join us in the challenge?

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COME AND CHAT WITH DANIELLE

Join us in getting to know Danielle on Friday night, December 12th, at 9 p.m. EST (that would be 8 p.m. CST my time) in the chatroom. Come ready with your questions. Who knows, maybe she will have a surprise for us.

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DESIGNER TECHNIQUE TUTORIAL

Here's Danielle's Technique Tutorial for you!


Getting More Out of the Hue/Adjustment Slider, aka Recoloring Like a Pro!

Intro...

You may already know how to do a quick recolor using the hue/saturation sliders in Photoshop. But what about those multicolored objects that seem impossible to recolor without getting some unwanted hues? Here's a trick you may not know.

1. This "love" word art is pretty, but say I need it to be all blue, like the "v", to match my layout. The trick is to edit by color using the hue/saturation slider.

2. Open your hue/saturation slider either by hitting CTRL+U on your keypad or by navigating to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation. As you can see in the above image, the default is set to "Master". If you adjust the master file as I did here, everything changes - even the colors you want to keep.

3. There is a better way. Next to the word "master", you'll notice a dropdown arrow. Click on that, and you'll see a list of colors. You can use this dropdown to edit your colors one by one, which gives you tons more control.

4. Not sure which color to choose? In my sample, I am wanting to recolor the "L" first. To see what color family it is, sometimes I like to use my eyedropper tool to select the color of the object as my foreground color. So, I clicked on the "L" with my dropper and it became my foreground color. I then clicked on my foreground color to see where the color fell in the spectrum. In this example, it's obviously magenta, but some colors are not as easily to identify by eye. Like browns.

5. So, now that we've identified the main color of the "L" to be magenta, let's scroll down to Edit:Magentas. Now I can play around with the sliders until I get the color I want.

6. For some files, like this one, it is important to remember to recolor everything at once. If I hit "OK" after recoloring just my "L", the change is permanent. Until I close the hue/saturation box, I can still choose "magnetas" and recolor that "L" to any color. But once I close it after making it blue, it's blue (or cyan) for good. That means if I wanted to choose "Edit:Cyans" to recolor the "V" to purple, the "L" will get recolored as well. Sometimes that's useful, but for this word art, I am going to recolor all of my colors at once. I chose "Edit:Blues" for the "O" and "Edit:Greens" for the "E". I messed around with the sliders until all of my letters were close to the blue of the "V". That's it! Hope you find this little trick useful!