Digitize Your Watercolors: Getting Started With Adobe Photoshop | Anne Butera | Skillshare
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Digitize Your Watercolors: Getting Started With Adobe Photoshop

teacher avatar Anne Butera, Artist. Instigating creativity and joy.

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:01

    • 2.

      Scanning Your Artwork

      6:26

    • 3.

      A Photoshop Overview

      15:34

    • 4.

      Editing Example 1: Marigolds

      15:17

    • 5.

      Editing Example 2: Marigolds Variation

      7:25

    • 6.

      Editing Example 3: A Pink Rose

      16:36

    • 7.

      Creating Useable Documents

      10:41

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About This Class

This class is designed to help the beginner become comfortable with the basics of Adobe Photoshop with the specific purpose of digitizing watercolor illustrations.

Adobe Photoshop is a powerful and complex program and when you're just starting out it can be hard to know where to begin. 

When you digitize your art you can use your images online for your blog, website, portfolio or shop. You can use your images in marketing materials such as business cards and postcards. Digitizing your watercolors will also allow you to use the images on a variety of products from fine art prints to greeting cards to calendars and even fabric design.

This class takes you through the process of digitizing watercolor illustrations. It starts by sharing how to create a useable scan of your art. Next it walks you through the process of removing the background and cleaning up your image in Photoshop so you'll end up with something you can use for many different purposes.

Because there are many ways of removing the background and cleaning up an image in Photoshop, this class demonstrates the process with three example projects. Throughout it gives tips and suggestions to help you be more comfortable and flexible when working with the program.

The last segment helps you create documents in different sizes and configurations specific to different purposes.

By the end of the class you should be ready to digitize your own artwork.

Meet Your Teacher

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Anne Butera

Artist. Instigating creativity and joy.

Top Teacher

I'm a full-time artist, art educator and writer, but for a long time I believed I wasn't good at art and could never be an artist.

The beginning of my story might sound similar to yours. When I was a child I loved to make things, but as I grew up I "learned" I wasn't good at art and stopped making it.

But that wasn't the end of my story.

I love teaching on Skillshare because through my classes I can help YOU reclaim YOUR creativity. I know what it's like to yearn to make art but not know where to start.

Are you ready to begin rewriting your story?

Read My Blog

Get My Free Sketchbook Guide

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Anne Butera. I'm the artist behind the website blog, My Giant Strawberry. I'm passionate about encouraging you to embrace your creativity and discover your joy. In this class, we're going to be taking our art into the digital realm. I will be helping you get started learning Photoshop. I'm going to show you, how I take my original watercolor paintings, scan them, bring the file into Photoshop, clean it up to get rid of the background, and end up with a digital file for your website and also for print materials, business cards, postcards, calendars and other products, and even fabric designs. I hope you're excited to get started, and if you're ready to begin learning Photoshop, I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. Scanning Your Artwork: The first step of digitizing your artwork is to scan your painting. You take your scanner, put your painting on the flat glass plate of your scanner, close the lid and then you get on your computer to choose the settings and create your scan. I'm using image capture with my scanner to create my scans. No matter what program you're using, you're going to be choosing some settings here. We want color, and then resolution is the important one. Print resolution is 300, that's 300 pixels per inch. I usually scan higher, I like to scan at 720. That gives you a lot more flexibility and if you wanted to make an enlarged print of your painting, then it would allow you to do that. If you are scanning right at 300, you'd have to print at the exact size. Or you could also print smaller but you wouldn't be able to enlarge it. Now, right now you can see I don't have a size here, but using this little marquee, I can draw the box around the image. That is what we'll scan, and it shows you what that size is. The other things I'm not going to mess with it all because we're going to be working in Photoshop with the image. If you want to experiment with some of these others, that's perfectly fine but I'm not going to talk about that in this class. Once you have your scan, it'll take a few minutes to scan at the high resolution, which we don't have to worry about since I already have our scan right here in Photoshop. Before I start editing this image, I just want to talk a little bit more about scanning and scanners. The reason I chose this painting was because it's a nice small image and fits easily on the scanning bed of my scanner. The hot press paper makes it easy to remove the background. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But I also wanted to show you some examples of some scans that are a little harder to create that I created with my original scanner. You might have one like that. In this image, you can see that this corner is blurry and there's a bit of a shadow. Now, the reason for this result with the scanner is that the paper was not flat against the glass because this is a large painting, it overlapped over the sides of the scanner. In the areas where it was not in direct contact with the glass, this is the result. Now, that type of scanner is a CIS scanner that stands for contact image sensor. If you're in the market to purchase a scanner, you might want to take a look at that aspect. The other type of scanner is a CCD scanner. That means charged coupled device. I'm not sure exactly how that works, but with a scanner like this, it doesn't matter if your paper is not in direct contact with the glass. I recently purchased a new scanner and I'll show you. I took a scan. Here's another scan from my original scanner. This one is pretty good except here on this top edge, it gets a little blurry and you can see the shadow. Here are a couple scans from my new scanner which is a CCD scanner. This hung over the edge of the scanner and there is a little bit of shadowing. Mostly you see shadows on the texture of the paper but these edges that overlap are not at all blurry. Here's another, you can see these corners, again, not blurry. If you have a CIS scanner, don't worry, it's possible to work with images like this. It just takes a lot more work stitching pieces together and you have a lot of unusable areas of your scan. I'm really looking forward to working with my new scanner because I think it'll go a lot more quickly for me, and it won't have to make this many scan, I won't have to do as much editing in Photoshop. One more thing, I will be sharing some links with you in the handouts so you can read a little bit more about CIS and CCD scanners, giving you some suggestions of different makes and models, so you can make your own choice if you need to purchase a new scanner. We're going to get started doing some editing and I will see you in the next lesson. 3. A Photoshop Overview: I really love using Photoshop, but before I started learning the program, I was really intimidated by it. It seemed too professional and too complicated to learn. In truth, it is a really complex program and it is very powerful and it will take a long time to really get comfortable using it. But I think it's really worth it. I couldn't imagine being able to create some of the products that I do today without it. One of the things that's important to keep in mind is that there are many ways of doing each different action in Photoshop. Just because I do things one way, doesn't mean that you can't do them another. I'll show you a couple of different ways of doing things. One of my secret weapons is to just Google something if I don't know how to do it, and I'll find lots of different tutorials. Let's get started. First let me show you around the program. I'm using Photoshop Creative Suite 6. You can find out what your version is by going up to Photoshop, about Photoshop, and it'll let you know what version you have. The current version is the Creative Cloud, and instead of purchasing that outright, you pay a monthly fee to use it. I think it's pretty similar to this. The main things I'll be showing you should be similar if you have the newer version. One other thing, if this screen is looking different than your program, I have adjusted the colors of mine. You can go up to Photoshop, Preferences and go to Interface, and then change the color themes. I keep mine light. But you can choose whatever is your preference. Up here, the File menu, pretty much what you'd expect in the File. Edit, we'll be using that a lot. Your Image, Adjustments, you can use this. We're not really going to be using any of these adjustments here. I use them more with photos than with my art. The Layers, we'll definitely be using. One of the things that's hardest to get your mind around when you're first learning Photoshop is these layers. Over here on the right is your Layer panel. For this document, there aren't any layers except for the background. I'm going to take a look at another document. This is from my website and it's a photograph that I have added text to. Very simple. Over here in the Layers panel, you see the Background which is the original image. Then there are two other layers, and these are our text layers. They're actually not in order on here. The order is important because anything that is lower down on the list will be covered by anything that is opaque and higher on the list. I'll give you an example of this while we go along but just keep that in mind. Now, this background, this original photograph is locked. That's what this means. That means you can't move it. See, you could not use the move tool because the layers are locked. The other thing to keep in mind over here are these little eyeballs. When you click on them so that they disappear, that is making them invisible. This can be helpful if you are focusing on what is around that and you don't want to be distracted by your layers. When the layer is highlighted, that's the layer that you're going to be adjusting if you use any tools on it, if you're moving it, if you're erasing. It's the highlighted in blue, that's your selected layer. As I said this is the hardest thing to get your brain around when you're just starting out because if I don't have this selected and I want to move this text here, I can't because I'm working on the selected layer. You'll get the hang of it eventually. When we're working with more layers that are image-based and not text, you'll be able to see what I'm talking about. But for now, we'll just close that file. I'm not going to save it. We'll go back here. I'm going to go through some of these other menu items. We talked about the layers. Type that has to do with text. We're not really going to play with that at all. Select, and I'll show you especially this Select, Inverse is important with what we're going to be doing. Filters, we're not going to really use but you can see most of these other things we're not going to use. I find that the Help menu is not very helpful. As I said before, the best way to figure out how to do something if you're stuck or if you don't know what you're doing is just to Google it and you'll find lots of tutorials that will help you move past your frustrations. Look for as many tutorials and classes as you can find. You'll always pick up something and it'll just help you refine the way you work. The other thing I'll show you before we got started actually doing anything is over here on the left. This is your toolbar. This top one which is selected now, you can see it's selected because it's a darker colored gray. That is the Move Tool. So if you have to move a certain part of the image, that's how you would do it. This is the Marquee Tool. Whenever you see the little tiny arrow pointing outwards, that means that there are other options for this tool, so you just have to press, click hard and when you lift up, your other options will come. So this is the rectangular marquee. There's also elliptical. Then single row and single column. The rectangular will let you make a shape like that. Then you can either cut, copy or do changes to just the area. I use it a lot and we'll be using it here. One nice thing to know about the rectangular and the elliptical when you're to using either of these, if you hold the Shift button down while you are creating your shape, it'll give you a perfect circle up here in the Ellipse Tool, or if you're in the rectangular tool, holding down your Shift will give you a perfect square. The Lasso Tool is another way to select something and here you can just draw with your mouse, make a circle around it, follow the outline of your image. If you stop before going all the way around, it'll do a line across from where you started to where you stopped. One thing that I recently just learned that is really helpful and quick, I don't use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but this one I think will help me save a lot of time. That's deselect. Here on a Mac, it's Command D. That makes you a little sparkling line go away. If you want to learn some other keyboards shortcuts, you can find what they are in these menus next to the different actions. So this shows you what the keyboard shortcuts are if you're looking to try some of them. The next, this one has a fly out menu too, the lasso. There's the Polygon Lasso Tool. I don't really use that a lot, but the magnetic is nice. It's a little hard to get used to, but once you put your first point down, it will automatically follow the shape that is there. It detects what the shape is. Now I have found that if you click, it can put a point where you want it to be. So if you're having trouble having it register, my trouble usually comes when it's a really pale color that I'm trying to use this tool, it won't register it. I'm going to just stop because that would take a long time. There is a lot easier way to get rid of the background. I'm just going to change this back to the Lasso tool, the plane one. This next tool is the Magic Wand Tool. This is what we're going to use for getting rid of the background here. See this will select, I clicked on the white and it's highlighting that whole white area. If you click on the image, it's going to select things that are of a similar color and tone. So you can see they've got the white again. That wouldn't be too helpful for doing this image. There's just too many tones, but one thing to know is if you are trying to select multiple areas, if you hold down the Shift after selecting the first, and then you hold down Shift and click, it's going to add to what you've already selected. So you can see how we're getting more and more of the image to be included. I'm still holding down the Shift, so that'll come in handy. This is cropping. You can crop your image. The pale gray area, that's what's going to be removed. We won't actually do that because I want to keep it, but that'll show you one more thing. Let's say you accidentally crop off what you want from your image, don't freak out. Just go up to Edit, and then undo. The keyboard shortcut for undo is Command Z on a Mac. So now we just undid, undoing, so that's why it took us back to this. The next thing is stepping backward. So that takes you further back than just one undo. So if you mess up, you can just go back and back. We're going to deselect right now. The Eyedropper tool selects a color. We aren't really going to be using that so much here, but you can see that the colors will change right there. This is the Patch Tool, and it can be really helpful. We're not really going to use it here. This is the Clone Stamp Tool. This one is the History Brush Tool. We're not really going to really worry about that, I'll deselect this. We've got the eraser, we're going to be using that here. Really that's about it. So I know this is a lot to take in, I don't want you to feel overwhelmed. Just know that it'll take some time and it'll take you working with the program to get familiar with it and to get comfortable, so don't give up, and the best way to learn is by doing. Now I think we can get started. 4. Editing Example 1: Marigolds: Okay, we're going to start with this miracle painting. What we're doing is basically just getting rid of the background. For this one, the background is pretty white already, so it'll be quick and easy. This one, you can see that the background is more of a creamy color and there's definitely a texture to the background, and that is fine. But if you're going to be doing prints or using your image on as a motif on your website, you're not going to want to have the texture and color of that image. So you're going to have a big block of color, which if you want is fine. But if you're printing business cards, for example, and you want your image just right there on the white, you need to get rid of your background. But my first tool always with this, before we start doing anything to this file, I'm going to create a new file. Because I generally don't work directly on the scan, I take my image and put it into a new file. So for this one, our original size is four inches across and around nine and a half inches high. Now what I'm going to do for this new file, we're going to make it 8 by 10. Just to give you an example to help you understand the resolution, if you remember, this scan is at 720 DPI, which is also pixels per inch. DPI stands for dots per inch, but here you're going to see pixels. So I'm going to make this new file 300, and I'm going to choose RGB as my color mode. Generally, RGB is for web and CMYK is for printing. If you're doing images for the web. If you have a file, a JPEG, that's a CMYK file, your color is going to be all wrong and vice versa. Meaning if you're printing something and it's an RGB, your colors are not going to be quite right. Make sure any web files are RGB. If they're for web, you'd want a lower resolution than this two, so keep that in mind as well. But right now I'm going to make, say we're doing a print of this marigold image, and we want an 8 by 10 print, this is what this file, that's wrong. I'm just going go rotate this. One more thing I'm going to show you about Photoshop. Up here, you can go into the view and you can see the zoom in, zoom out, we're going to zoom out a little bit. But what I like to use is a keyboard shortcut for this. Zooming in is Command and the plus key, and down in the bottom corner, you're going to see the percentage you're at. On the screen, this is going to just keep getting bigger even though this is only 8 by 10 because of the resolution difference between the computer screen and print. That's why this is an inch, is looking a lot bigger than an inch. If you want to go to a 100 percent, you can see an inch is almost, four inches, three inches. That explains the difference. It gives you a good example of the difference, anyway. If we were to make our print by just creating a new layer in our new document, we will go up to the layer menu and say Duplicate Layer, and then choose our new untitled document, say, "Okay." When we come back to this document, you can see this shows you the resolution difference between the 300 DPI image that we just created and the 720 DPI image that we scanned. Now, I want this to fit on the page. To do that, we're going to edit it. So go up to Edit and then Free Transform. That's going to change your image, the size. Now, a new image, I'm just clicking and dragging, pulling this down. If you use a corner to change the size, if you hold down the Shift button while you are clicking and dragging, the corner of the image to change the size really. It will keep your aspect ratio so your image doesn't get distorted. See if you can pull it and distort your image. Now if you do something like that, while you're still in the Free Transform, you can go up to your Edit, Undo, and it'll bring you back to your correct aspect ratio. Another way to do that is to click on this little button to bring it back I'll show you. Distorting it, click on that, and it'll bring it back. Now since I made it bigger, it made it larger as well. Another way that you can change the size, you can be more exact with changing your size up here with these numbers. Right now, it's at 93.77 percent of the height of the original image. The width is in inches. You can see the difference. We're going to change the height. Instead of percent, I'm going to make that in inches as well. I'm just going to type 9.5 inches, and come back, click our little "Aspect Ratio" button, and here you go. That will give you a nice size for your print. Now that the white space of the background is not taking up the entire screen, you can see the difference in the actual white of your document and the white of the scanned paper. So there's a color difference in here on the edge, there's a bit of a shadow. All these things, we're going to get rid of for our final image. Now, generally when I'm working with my scan, I create an exact duplicate document in terms of your DPI and the measurements. What I would do would be to make this about four inches wide and nine and a half inches tall at 720, so that I have an exact replica of my original image. We'll work from here, and I'll show you there are a couple ways to go about getting rid of the background. Now, my first tool to use that I like to work with for this is the magic wand. I'm going to select the color white of the paper, and then I'm just going to use the Delete key on my keyboard and take it away. Now, you can see that it is gone except in these areas. Let me show you. There is that are between the flower and the leaves are not selected. You don't see that wiggly dotted line in this area. Now, remember, I told you if you hold the Shift button and click with the magic wand, it will add an area to what you're selecting. Now, this area is also selected. We can keep doing that to select all of these areas. I'm purposely going to miss a couple to show you a different way of working. I'll delete this and then deselect. Now, with this white background, I'm going to zoom in, remember, that's Command plus, the difference in the color is very subtle. Here is the white paper and here is the white of the background. Now, if you're having a hard time seeing this, you might benefit from adding another layer. I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to "Layer", "New Fill Layer", we're going to do a solid color, and I'm just going to choose gray. This will fill with the last color that I chose with the color picker, even though I did select gray. I'm going to choose a nice dark black color. Now, you see that's covering up our image. We don't want our image covered up. We're going to move this image, this layer, this black color fill below the flower image. Now, that layer is above, on top of the black so you can easily see that bit of white that's still left. I'm going to zoom in and use my magic wand to select the white bits, and delete what we have left. Now, I really like being able to zoom in. Because that's at 200 percent, you can see it's starting to get a little blurry. Go a little bit smaller back down to 100 percent gives you a better view of those tiny little spaces that are still filled. Now, I have gotten rid of all of the white background. There are a few areas that are pale right in here that didn't get picked up. I'm going to delete that. Also, when you are looking with this dark background, you can see any little flaws, anything that you missed. Sometimes, there'll be little flecks of color that got picked up by the scanner, little splashes from your paintbrush. I'm not really seeing any. I'm just moving my document, scrolling around it to take a look and see what I see. It looks pretty good. I'm going to just delete this black background, unless of course you want a black background, you can do that too. Zoom out. A quick way to get zoomed out so you see the full page is Command 0. That brings you back to being able to see the full document. Here is my image, ready for me to use it as I'd like. Remember, this one is a 300 DPI, 8 by 10 which is perfectly fine for printing. The image is going to be about as large as it is on the original painting. But if you're wanting to go up, scale at larger, this resolution won't let you do that. I'm actually not going to save this. In the next lesson, I will show you another way of removing the background and creating a new file of this marigold image. See you there. 5. Editing Example 2: Marigolds Variation: I'm going to show you another way of working. This time I'm going to make my document four inches wide and 9.5 inches high and we'll go with the original 720 DPI. Now, a different way that I like to get rid of the background. Instead of taking this whole layer, I'm going to use the magic wand to select the white and then go up here to select inverse. Now, everything within this dotted line is selected, so the flower is selected. Again, these little parts are also selected. The white in between is selected, but we'll take care of that in our new document. Then I'm going to go up here to edit, copy, go to my new document and then paste. [inaudible] definitely use a keyboard shortcuts, command C, and command B. I find that sometimes when I have a large area selected, it doesn't like to paste it in. I'm not sure why that is, but it happens. Here's my document. White background, we hide the background that's another way you can see. This little checkerboard is a transparent background there's nothing there. so you can see, if we zoom in, this transparent background will show you, look we need to get rid of this. Again, using the magic wand, we can click and delete. Hitting the delete button on my keyboard to delete all these little tiny spots of white. We could also select one, hit the shift and the magic on click, and that'll let you delete two at the same time, whatever way you're most comfortable working. But the background back in, then all you have to do to save your file. Command that you will deselect that little area. I'm going to change my tool to the move tool to give you an idea of how that works. When I haven't the move tool, when I'm on the selected layer, it will let me move that layer, that image all around the document. Let's say I wanted to reposition it I could do that. The little pink lines that are appearing, that's showing me that the edge of this layer is hitting the edge of the document. And that is because if we go up here to view and look down to this where it says snap tool. We are snapping two layers and to the document bounds. That's not really something that's going to affect us right now with what we're doing. But it can come in very handy if you're trying to line things up and get your layers or your images perfectly aligned. We're finished with that one, I would save this, my usual way of working once I have gone to this point is to save in this folder, say miracles, I already have a file named that. But just to show you, here you can choose the file type. I'm going to leave this as Photoshop because that'll give me my layers. The benefit of that is if I just want this Marigold, let's say I'm working on a fabric pattern or I'm working on a business card or something else like that. If I just want to drop in this Marigold without any white, it would let me save it like that without a background. Although, there's a background here in the file, you have a layer that is without a background. Just to give you an example of how that would work, say I wanted to put something else on this image that had a background. We'll just use the original Marigold to give you an example. We want to take this image layer, duplicate layer, put that on our new document. Say you wanted two Marigolds on your page, because is not big enough for two. But you can see with this background, you have all the white as well as all your image. Then I'll show you how having no background can be an advantage, we'll change to the Marigold that we took the background away from. This has no background, and so if you wanted things to overlap, but still be able to see through, you can do that. I'm not going to save this. We're finished with these Marigolds right now. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to get rid of the background with our pink rose, which has a much more distinct background to it. I'll see you in that lesson. 6. Editing Example 3: A Pink Rose: Welcome back. We're going to work on this pink rows next. Looks like this image is about four by six. I'm going start by creating a new document that is six inches wide, four inches high. We'll keep the resolution at 720 and the color mode at RGB. Here is our new white background. We'll go back to the pink rows. I'll show you why this is going to be a tricky one. We use the Magic Wand, select the white background. You can see that here, this pink petal is not being picked up. All of these are registering as part of the white background because it's just too pale. There are a few ways of dealing with this. I've tried many ways. The one that works best for me is to do this in parts. I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to select Inverse. That is selecting just the painting image; the leaves, the flower. This petals are going to be left out and I'll show you what I mean by that when we go Edit, Copy to our new document, Edit, Paste. All of this is showing up as white because it wasn't selected. Don't worry, don't freak out. We're going to make a new layer with the flower. Sadly this Magic Wand is not going to pick up the petals. Now you can change the sampling size. We didn't talk about that before. Right now I have the tolerance set to 60. A point sample of the tolerance is 60. If we were going to change this to, let's say 20, that is going to be a lot more sensitive. It's going to pick up all these little highlights on the paper this little shadows. It's picking up more of your flower, but you got a lot of background noise, which we don't want. I'm leaving that at 60, but it's not going to work for us to use the Magic Wand. I'm going to just use the lasso tool. I'll give you the same. If we use to the magnetic lasso tool, it can follow around. You could see it's missing that little point. We could force it. But if I zoom in, you can see that I still missed part. Unless we connect these, this is just going go on forever. I'm going to connect it back up. We don't really want that. I'm going to deselect it. It's just really hard to get it perfect. We could go along with this, again, it's not quite doing it. Then we'd have to keep zooming in and out. It's just a little hard to do. I'm going to use just the regular old lasso tool. I click and then I'm dragging my mouse around the flower. Some of the weight is going to be in the lasso and that is okay. We've got the whole thing circled. Now I'm going to go up here to Edit, Copy. On our new document; Edit, Paste. We're going to have to move it into place. I'm using the move tool and just clicking and dragging until that looks pretty good. Now, to get rid of this white paper with the texture what I'm going to do is zoom in, could help to zoom all the way to a 100 percent. We'll just work a little bit by bit. We're going to use the eraser tool. Up here, you can change the size of our eraser. How many pixels you want it to be? So you can get bigger or really small. You can take it all the way down to one pixel, which is really tiny. Let's make it about here. You can choose what hardness you want of really hard eraser will erase everything. If it's a softer eraser will erase less thoroughly. But I want to erase everything. You can see what I'm doing is just erasing that paper texture that we don't want. One thing that's nice. You have this little bit here. Instead of using the eraser on it, I'm going to use the Magic Wand tool, select it, and then delete. There you go. If I use the Magic Wand tool on the white paper background, that is right directly next to this pale pink. It's going to select the pink as well, which we don't want because we'll end up with the same image that we have underneath. Just to go and remind you, we'll hide making visible this layer with the flower. That I'll show you, I'm going to just deselect it. There we go. What we just have to do is slowly erase all of the white parts. Zoom back in, go back to our Eraser tool. Now the eraser is working. I click and hold, and drag the mouse. This is not erasing this leaf because this leaf is not in this layer. We could just hide this layer as we go around so it doesn't distract us. It's up to you. One thing to keep in mind is that if you click Hold and continuously drag your eraser around, then let's say you get something you don't want, make a mistake. If you go up here to undo, it's going to erase everything from that same click. I like to do things in small bits so I don't have to go back and redo things that I've already done, if I mess up. Just little bits. Now in truth, you don't have to do all this green because it's just going to blend in with the green of that flower. It's really up to you, you can work that way, but you don't have to. This part is a little bit tedious and slow, you just have to be careful that you don't erase more than you really want to. Here we've got a chunk that we can use our Magic Wand on and delete. Command D, deselects that. I'm just using my scroll to get around here. Just keep going with the eraser. Sometimes you'll need to change the size to get more accurate. Just keep following along. Every once in a while, just take your mark off to the side, so you can delete a big chunk. Remember Command D, deselect, go back to our eraser and continue around the rest of the rows. Just following along the petals. Every once in a while, taking the eraser off to the edge and you can delete two chunks at the same time, remember if you click and hold the Shift and click again, it will get the two different sections together. That can save you a little bit of time selecting more than one. Just continue along the edge. Now I'm thinking we might not be exactly in line with the image below. It's like a double edge. The way we can fix that is to go to the move tool and just move ourselves into place. You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move with the move tool. Zoom in. We're a little bit too zoomed in and see if we line up. We'll know better after we do this last part here. But sometimes you'll get a double edge like that when the two layers aren't quite lined up and that's okay. Because the layers are separate, we can still fix it. I'll go back and delete these little parts. I'm just going to take a look and see how we're doing in terms and we're still going to have problems here, but I am going to just double-check here. Still really getting a lot of these petals as well as the background. We're going to go back to our eraser, deselect that, to go into that crease. Go back to our eraser, make it smaller. That's a little too small, still a little too big. All right, that's good. Deselect that. We're almost there. If you're working on a larger piece with multiple flowers or motifs that you need to clean up, you do it the same way, just taking them one at a time. We'll take a look. That looks good. Now the final thing that you need to do with your image is to merge these two layers so that they're not separate right now. There's two separate pieces here. We want them to be all one. If we highlight both of the layers by clicking on one and then holding the Shift button down, the Shift key on the keyboard and clicking the other one will appear to your layer menu and then merge layers. Now it's one whole image. One more thing I'm going to show you over here with your layers. After you've merged the layers, the name of the layer that will remain is the name from the top layer. You can name your layers whatever you want. To rename one, you just click on the name and then type what you want it to be. If you have a lot of layers in your document, it's nice to have specific names. If there's only one or two, I often don't rename mine. I think that covers it. In the next lesson, I'm going to just share some ideas and tips for using the images that you've created. See you there. 7. Creating Useable Documents: Now that you're finished digitizing your images, you'll want to be able to use them. One of the first things that I always do is to create a file to use in my portfolio and I have a blank template document. This is a Photoshop document that I'll submit to DPI and the measurements are 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. If you look on my portfolio, you can see what these look like. They're all square so that they line up well, and they have a white background to them. Here's my blank document. The way I'd create that is to just duplicate my layer onto my template. Now, we don't see my layer here, and the reason for that is because it is a much higher resolution than this document, so we have to resize it. We're going to go up to Edit and then Free Transform. We can see the corner of the document here. We're going to resize this with the measurements. This is about almost 14 inches wide. Let me try making this into 13 inches and I fix the aspect ratio. Now we can't see the document at all. One way to bring it back is to use this little measurement up here. This little box shows you which point is at these measurements. Right now this white point, that's one in the center, is at this pixel measurements. To bring it back I usually will reset them to zero, and then you simply drag your image into place. Hitting Return will cause the transformation to be finished. There are a couple of ways that you can precisely set your image on the document. You can eyeball it too, that's fine. But I'll show you if you go up to View, and then Show, and say Grid, this will give you a grid on which to line up your image. You can count the number of squares on each edge to make sure it lines up. Another way you can do that, I'm going to get rid of this grid, is to create some guides. If you go up to View, and then New Guide, our document is 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels, so I'm going to put a guide right down the center, and right down the center. This is in inches, I'm going to put 500 pixels. You simply have to type px at the end, say Okay, that'll be a horizontal line, and then View, New Guide, 500 pixels. We'll do this one vertically. Now remember I talked about snapping two layers and guides, which you can find here. View, Snap To, Guide is checked. That means that when we're moving this, there's going to be a slight hesitation when it hits the guide. When the center of the image hits the guide, it's going to give me a slight hesitation. I'll do that until it stops left and right and up and down, until I feel that hesitation. This is now centered, we can get rid of the guides, and then I would save my image. On my website, it's not going to take a Photoshop document, so I'll go up here to File, Save As, and then I'll call this Mini Rose, and change this to a JPEG, and say Save. I already have a document with that name and I don't really want to replace it, so let's just pretend that I did. Now, that will give me an image with a white background that shows up as a white background. Looking back here, you can see there will be edges on my image. If, for example, I want an image with no edges on it, like my logo up here or here on my blog I have some other images like this leaf, here's a flower, here's another leaf on the front page of my website. I also have these maple seeds and this strawberry. All these little images have no edges, they don't have a white background. We can do that too. If you want to have an image that does not have a white background, I can use this image to create it to this file. See this background. If we delete it, it gives us a transparent background. As I said before whenever there's that little gray checkerboard behind there, that means there is nothing there. It's transparent. To create this file. If we saved this as a JPEG, it would save with a white background, which will give us the same problem we had before. But, if we go to our File, Save As, and we choose PNG as our file type, and save that as a PNG. You'll just leave these here like that, say Okay. Now your image will have no background to it. Let's say then that you want to open your file. Pull it up here. Here's your mini rose that is a PNG file. If I pull this up, you can see there is no background at all. If I were to use this on my website, it would appear like this with no edges. Wouldn't have the text on it but, it would have no edges. That is the beauty of a PNG file. If we go back to Photoshop here, I'm not going to save this document. If you're going to be creating an image she is for any other document, you would just do it the same way. When you're creating a new file, you'll choose the measurement here, your resolution, and your color mode. If you're going to be having it printed by another company, let's say you are using MOO for your business cards, refer to their file guidelines. They'll tell you what color mode to use, what resolution they'll need. Generally for print resolution is 300, and your color mode for print is CMYK. If you're going to be making your own prints, that's what you'd set it up as. Then you would choose if you wanted to do an 8 by 10, print, that's how you would work that. If you were going to do a different file type, you would just set up your new file with whatever requirements your printer specifies. I hope that now you're feeling confident enough to try Photoshop on your own. Take one of your paintings, scan it, bring it into Photoshop, remove the background, and then create a file to upload for your class project. Remember, the file should be at 72 DPI, it should be set to RGB for your color mode. You can choose whatever dimensions work best with your image. If you have any questions you can ask them in the class discussion, or remember, my virtual door is always open. Email me at ann@mygiantstrawberry.com. Thanks so much for taking this class. Wishing you much joy.