A question about making overlays

[twinsmom1]

Hello! It's me again and I have a question about making overlays this time. I have several pictures I want to use, but they are not 12x12 size. I have an idea of where to start, but don't know where to go once I do get started!! I want to be able to make my own overlays and would like a little help and direction on how to do them. If anyone has any tips, pointers, or knows where there is a good tut for it, please let me know!!

melanie

[nifty]

What kind of overlays are you talking about, and what types of pictures do you have?
for random texture, what you can do if you want it larger, is to pull it into a square template, duplicate the layer, mirror image one and pull it down to match the sides together. You can flatten and repeat that process as often as you need to. That works in some instances. Otherwise you can just blow up the image to fill the template and crop. In any case you want to desaturate the colour. (some people like colour but I find unless you use the same colour overlay on everything in your kit you're throwing off your colour pallete and you'll notice it.) Then crop to the template size. As I've said before, whatever you're doing *always* start with a clean empty template, it really makes life easier in the long run, and very important in terms of the information you leave behind in your work (ie your photo exif data which you don't want every person who uses your kit to see) as well as any chance of overwriting the original. It's absolutely the worst habit you can have in the digital world.
You can also play with 'make seamless' it was discussed a while back, in terms of it's limitations, and remember that you can create a number of them and create a number of them, fill various layers with the texture and shift them to line up to a pleasing pattern (because each seamless pattern will center it's image, so if you shift layers to fill the gaps in another layer etc.). It's something you just need to play with and get a sense for.

Transparencies you clean up just like you would your brushes and use the colour to alpha tool to remove the background colour. The hue-saturation tool also helps tremendously for cleaning up an image.

I hope that helps a bit, but maybe if you're more specific in what you're trying to accomplish I can answer more of your questions.

Just one more note, when you're using photographs, make sure you're not infringing on any copyrights...it's sad but I see it done so often. If the *exact* same thing can't be manufactured by another company you seriously need to think about copyright issues. (ie. a plain woven fabric vs a texture woven in, or a print; the latter are copyrighted. A staple is a staple, same for paperclips... umpteen companies make the exact same thing. Nature shots are absolutely great lol )

[nifty]

There are absolutely no run on sentences in that last post : I hope it makes sense lol

[twinsmom1]

the pictures I would be using would be mine completely. I want to try to make my own things. I took several pictures of things at the zoo. They had all kinds of great textures and other things like that. I had read somewhere where you could go in and add a comment or something about the items you made. I an unsure of how to do this, or is it when you first set the parameters for your page. I know when you set the size, the DPI, and then whether it is transparent, background color, etc, there is also a spot for comments. Can you add a comment about the picture you use there?? I know I read where you can do something like that and it stays with the picture--kinda like you own little copyright. Is this making sense?? I may start doing that for all things I make using my own stuff--such as elements and seamless patterns for papers, etc. Thanks for the help. I am going to give it a try in the next few days.