Your photo is out of focus. Keep or delete? There is a sharpening tool called auto sharpen. Frankly, it doesn’t seem to do much. Instead, a better tool called, funnily enough, the Unsharp Mask allows you to make effective manual adjustments. The goal is to sharpen as much as possible without over doing it. When […]
Archives for July 2018
Abstracting Photos for Quilts
I cannot say how much I found this lesson useful in turning photos into patterns for quilts or other types of art. You can do the same thing using pencil and paper or by projecting an image onto a wall, both of which I have done. But PSE makes the process so much simpler. Plus, […]
How to Brighten Your Images
In lesson eight of Photoshop Elements, we learned how to brighten images. For me, the course is about fabrics and how I can use the tools of PSE in fiber art. But brightening an image you want to use as inspiration can help you see it more clearly, so it is useful in ways beyond […]
Auditioning Fabric Colors
Photoshop has an easy way to audition colors in your quilts. It probably one of the easiest things to learn in the program. You can change the hue and saturation of an entire image or change colors individually. You can also “colorize”, making your image monochromatic. I chose this sample block for its variety of […]
Auditioning Fabrics
You can audition fabrics using Photoshop Elements in two different ways. One is to scan fabrics you own and drop them into Photoshop. The other way is to copy fabrics you are considering from the internet onto a “clipboard”. In this way, you aren’t buying fabric you ultimately don’t end up using. We learned how […]
Tracing and Quilting Lines
Lesson five of Photoshop Elements sounds simple. Not so much. Our exercise involved how to trace an image or audition quilting lines for a quilt. It’s so much harder than it looks. And here is one of my images to show just how challenging it is. I use a tablet and pen. I’ve tried drawing […]
Watermarks–important?
Lesson four in Photoshop Elements with the Pixeladies is how to overlay watermarks or other text on your images. As I mentioned, this is my second time taking the course. It’s exciting to see how much more I’m getting out of it. So while I knew how to do watermarks and text, I haven’t been […]
The Miracles of Photoshop
I’m taking the Photoshop Elements on-line course again through Pixeladies. (I thought they called themselves the Pixieladies for the longest time, and I couldn’t figure out why they picked that name. I’m sure they would have loved that. I misread their name the first time, and it stuck in my brain). Anyway, I learned a […]
Zigzag Pizzazz Class Coming Right Up!
On Monday, September 10th I’m giving a presentation at the Northwest Quilters Guild on machine embroidery techniques I call Zigzag Pizzazz. When I was studying design and embroidery through London City and Guilds, we spent one six-month session on machine embroidery. Among the numerous samples required, I did one each of satin stitch bars, satin […]
