Todays guest post is by AnnaTeamer, Chris Asbury, and shows you a unique way technique for adding adding a little extra festive magic to your Christmas layouts by superimposing Christmas lights over your photos.
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Step 1. Locate a string of mini white lights with white wire, which blends in better with a light background. Take a photo of your lights by laying them out on a plain white surface. I used a white tablecloth. The auto setting works fine for this technique because you’re going to use a blending mode on the lights photo. Take a few photos both with and without flash to compare results. I decided to use the non-flash photo because of the softer focus and lower contrast.
Step 2. Assemble the first few layers of the page using papers and elements from Anna’s ArtPlay Palette Sweet Christmas, as shown in the Layers Palette.
Step 3. You can enhance any object in a photo (i.e. the little wreath in the upper right of my photo) by adding light and consequently increasing the contrast of the image. Clip one of the FotoGlows from FotoGlows No. 5 to the photo and set the blending mode to Overlay at 100% opacity.
Step 4. Open the Christmas lights photo in Photoshop/Elements, move the image onto the layout using the Move tool from the Tools palette, and place as desired. Apply the Overlay blending mode to this image at 100% opacity. Note that, you may have to carefully erase some of lights background using a soft brush and low opacity avoiding the lights and wire.
Step 5. Duplicate the Christmas lights layer and change the blending mode to Soft Light at 100% opacity to increase the glow effect and add definition to the string of wire. Again, you may have to erase some of the background of the layer.
Note. I’ve chosen the Overlay and Soft Light modes for my lights layers, but depending on your focal photo and background paper you may get better results with different blending modes. I encourage you to experiment with the blending modes. You can quickly scroll through them by selecting *Normal* blending modes and moving up or down the list using the up/down arrow buttons on your keyboard.
You can see further examples of this technique here.
Would love to see what you come up with. Please post your pages here.
