I just whipped these screenshots up this morning for some of my Sweet Shoppe girlies, so I thought I’d come share with you too! Oh, and this paper is a TEENSY sneak peek of what’s comin’ at ya on Monday!

I am using Photoshop Elements 5 for this tutorial… but I’m sure it’s good for lots of PSE versions and all the PSCS versions. A girl at SSD easily adapted it and she was using PSP.

If you haven’t used the Dodge and Burn Tool, you are missing out! It is so awesome! I use it A LOT in my design work, but it’s super useful for scrappers too. The dodge tool is great for creating or enhancing highlights, and the burn tool darkens. For this first tutorial, I am going to show you how easy it is to fold a corner of paper!

ALL SCREENSHOTS ARE CLICKABLE SO YOU CAN GET A BETTER LOOK.


So, I’ve got my paper. I want to fold that upper right corner. I grab my Lasso Tool and select the Polygonal Lasso (circled in the screenshot). I click and drag to create the diagonal cut across the paper then click again once I reach the edge, drag it up to the corner and click again, then drag it back to where I started to create a closed triangle.

Next, I cut this selection to a new layer by hitting SHIFT+CTRL+J. Then I rotated the corner 180 degrees.

Now I’m going to grab my Dodge and Burn Tool (it’s marked in the screenshot below). I set it to BURN by selecting the hand up along the top toolbar. I’m working with a paper that is midtone, so I set the Range to Midtones. If I was using a very light paper, I’d set it to highlights…. or if I was using a very dark paper, I’d set it to shadows. I always keep the exposure very low (around 8%). I kept my brush fairly large… you can play with the size… it will depend on the size of whatever you’re working on. Then I brushed the edge of the corner to help make it look folded. I like to keep my exposure low and just build up the burn by brushing over the area until I like the way it looks.

Then I grabbed the DODGE tool (right next to the Burn Tool). I also set this to midtones and an exposure around 8%. I used a smaller brush this time. Then I brushed a little farther from the edge to try and make the fold look more curved at that point. Do you see how it’s highlighted now?

Then all I did was put a drop shadow on my folded corner! That’s it!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Tips and tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.