{Thursday Tutorial} Working With Digital Stamps

Hello, Cathy (scrappycath) here to share a little tip for working with digital stamps.  Krisi has a great set of Spring related sentiments called Write It: Spring Sentiments Digital Stamps in her shop. You can add dimension to your stamps by adding color.

I'm going to show you one way to add several colors to your digital stamps in Photoshop (or elements). As usual, there's always more than one way to do things in PS/PSE. So if you have a favorite way, by all means go ahead and use it!

First, you'll select the sentiment and open that file in Photoshop.  I'm using the "lucky me I have you" sentiment. Duplicate the layer and turn off the original layer.  Working on the copy layer, use the Polygonal Lasso Tool (circled in red in the image above), to draw around the part of the sentiment that you want to separate so that you can recolor it. When you've completely surrounded the item, you'll get those "marching ants" outlining it on your screen. You can see that I've outlined the "lucky me".  From the menu choose Select > Save Selection and give it a name.  Then press Ctrl+J. This will duplicate the selection onto it's own layer.

Click on the copy layer of the sentiment to make it active, then from the menu choose Select > Load > and choose the name of the selection you just saved. This will reload the original item you encircled. Press delete to remove it. Now you have the "lucky me" and the "I have you" on separate layers.

You can add a layer above each of these and clip papers from the kit you are using to recolor them. Or you can simply fill those layers with colors and clip them.  To clip a layer to the digital stamp layers, place the layer of paper or color above the digital stamp layer, then hover the mouse between the 2 layers, press Alt+click. this will clip the top layer to the one underneath.

I used papers from the digital kit that I was working with Lucky Me by Elise's Pieces, to color coordinate the sentiment with the card I created.

Here is a closer look at the sentiment.

If you want to keep a copy of the altered sentiment, be certain to choose File > Save As and save it as a layered .psd or .tif file. Be certain not to save it over the original digital stamp file.

Have fun coloring your digital stamps!

Cathy