Question for designers - Making my own paper - textures

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Question for designers - Making my own paper - textures

Quick question for designers... is there any way to add an all over texture to a paper without changing the color that I want it??

No matter how much I play with the lightness/darkness, saturation, blending options, opacity, or fill of the texture layer... I can't get it back to the true color I started with. Not even close actually, its way too dark.

It's driving me nuts! lol... and here I thought it would be fun to make my own paper!

-Catherine

When I am making papers what really changes the color is when I use some stock cardstocks I found around. They are free, huge, HQ... whe think they are really, really great! and when we use them... The colors go all wrong!
This is what I do:
-Convert the cardstock to black & white (They go gray)
-Open my blending options,
-check the color overlay,
-go to color overlay and change the blend mode to color (this will make it color everything with the color picked lighter or darker, but the same color;
-Don't forget to change the default gray to the color you want, of course!
- After that you may still need to change the brightness/ contrast of your document but the color will, eventually, be the right one...
I hope this helped, and if you didn't understand something I can post pictures somewhere
Hugs

Other way to convert to black and white is on Image>adjustments>desaturate (suposing you´re using photoshop)

What I usually do is:
-desaturate the texture, if it´s not already
-put it over the rest of the paper
-Set texture blending mode to soft light
-Click on view>gamut warning, to make sure that something I do don´t drop the paper off the gamut
-Check if the texture is appearing on all colors (if not, need to duplicate the texture and clip the duplicate copy - sometimes I duplicate the texture three or for times till it appears on an specific color;
-pick the color of the paper background and, with rectangle tool draw a rectangle on top of texture, to see how much it changed.
-If it changed too much, I check what happens if I use image - adjustments- levels and change the middle arrow location (usually it gets better when the middle arrow is on the middle of the highest "montain"
-If this don´t work, I go on brightness/contrast. Remember that, if you need more brightness than the arrow of the brightness/contrast tool allows, you can just click "ok" with it maxed and open brightness/contrast window again... the arrow will be on the middle, so you can add more brigthness.

I use Cintia's method, too...blending options are the best!

I generally use a variation of Cintia's process. I usually don't worry if the colour isn't an exact match especially if its a kit I'm designing for my shop and not a blog train.

Thanks everyone! I got the color really really close with Cintia's method. Haven't tried Lorien's yet, but I probably will just to check it out. smiley

update: I also found out you change the blending option to "overlay". smiley

Catherine, I don't have any technique to add to these excellent suggestions, but I wanted to provide some solidarity. When I tried making papers for the first time (for the first PS blog train) it was so horrible and hard. I could not get the texture to look right! So I identify with your predicament - I, too, thought making my own papers would be fun and kind of basic, and then it turned out to be the hardest part of designing!

Catherine, I hope you can enlarge these enough to read them or you my have a larger screen. If not please let me know and I will go back and write them all over again so you can read them.

It´s a fantastic tutorial Brenda smiley I´m amazed to know new tecniques through this topic!

I like to do transparent overlays of my digital papers. Frist I put a solid color background than copy put a trance parent paper over it in a layer. Or I just change the color of a texture I already have, and save them.

That's an awesome tutorial Brenda, thank you!

@Violet, thanks for sharing your experience! I started playing with designing my own paper for the next PS Blog Train, too!

Great way of doing that Brenda, thank you smiley

Ladies I have a follow up question. When I'm done making the paper, what is the best way to save it? Is it as simple as saving it as a jpeg with the highest quality settings? Or is there some better way to do it? Thanks!!
-Catherine

I save mine as jpg on high setting so its not too large a file.

I'm not sure if this is the best way though.

To make my paper files small without losing any quality, I flatten the image first, then save it as a jpeg at quality number 10. 12 is the highest, and its fine to save it at that level too, I just save mine at 10 because it dramatically reduces the file size without losing quality. Or at least that
is what I was always told when I used to work for a store:)

I do almost the same as Sheilla (I usually save as 11, that already reduces a lot in size...), but I have a plus I realised by myself:

Some of my papers used to drop off gamut when saved to .jpg, and, as we discussed before, changing a previous .jpg and re-saving, may make it lose quality. So, I realised that when I toggle gamut warning on while at saving screen and zoom at 100%, I´m usually able to see if putting it on 11 istead of 12 will make the paper be out of gamut. In this case, I just save as 12, because in my opinion the pain of host and download a bigger paper isn´t worth the possibility of someone printing a beautiful page with wrong colors... After saving the .jpg I always quality check again, to make sure the gamut didn´t drop off, but it doesn´t often happen anymore after I learned this.

I usually save mine on 9. If you do a test and look at one saved at high quality, you can't really tell the difference. Also, once you start saving above 10, it seems to make the file bigger than it should be. When I'd edit photos in Photoshop, it would save the file as bigger than the original, which seemed strange at the time, so I never go over 10.

I usually use whatever setting gets me to around 3mb for my files size and that usually brings me down to about 9 or 10 (always on a flattened file), but sometimes as low as 8 but I don't save below 8. And I always go in and check it at 100% to see if reducing the quality created any artifacts/pixelating. I was always saving all my papers at 12, but I've given up that paranoia and just go with the flow. smiley

Ok, what numbers are you talking about? So lost. Is this with PSP?

No, Nancy - I'm pretty sure they're talking about Photoshop, since I know most of those gals that posted in this thread use that program. But, yay, another PSP user here - HI! (I'm a PSP user, too) PSP digiscrappers are highly unrepresented in the digiscrapping community overall it seems or we'd see tutorials, classes & digiscrapping supplies specifically geared toward PSP users in the forums & stores... From what I've seen, very few have any. So if the digiscrapping supplies offered are not in .jpg, .png, .abr or .psd format we can't use it.

To PS users: Please don't take what I said the wrong way - my comments weren't meant to be snarky - just explaining how it is. smiley