Introducing the Christmas cards and gifts series

If you're like me, you wait until the very last minute to do your Christmas shopping. But maybe that will change this year (for both of us) with my October through December series of ideas for Christmas cards and gift ideas—all of which relate to photography, of course. Within the next couple of days I will post a card idea that relates to the "dots" theme, but today's idea is much more straightforward.

This is the photo we used for a card two years ago. That same year, I did one for a client that spelled NOEL using three kids and their dog (not an easy task). For the client, I did a grid of four in black and white with alternating red and green letters. For our own card, we stuck with all black and white.

The recipe
1. Get letters from a craft store and paint them

2. Take individual photos of each child with their letter. I used natural side lighting from a window. I would also recommend using a black or dark background. I used a dark wood screen and then darkened the background even more in Photoshop. Had I just used some black fabric, I could have saved a lot of time.

Note: Make room for serendipity. Eva would not cooperate. She began to cry after only a few photos and she wouldn't hold her letter. For a few seconds, she put her letter over her head and I took the photo that you see here. Her head became to "O" and the letter became a sort of halo. What was frustrating at the time of the shoot became, in my opinion, the best part of the card.

3. Do the Photoshop bit. We decided to make the photo into strips 2x6 inches long that would eventually end up on larger rectangles of prepared cardstock. The math was easy. I cropped each photo to a 2x2 inch square. I then created a new document (4x6 at 320 dpi) and dragged each square onto the appropriate place in the new document. Since my document was 4x6, I could fit two 2x6 strips on each photo (which made this an inexpensive project). Since I didn't feel like doing the dragging part two times, I deselected the backround layer (leaving the layers with the three kids visible) and selected "merge visible" from the layers pull-down menu. Now I could just copy (Mac: Command-J or PC: Ctrl-J) that layer and drag it down with the move tool (V) its spot. I flattened the whole thing and then got them printed.

4. Assemble the cards. This was Michelle's part of the job, so all I can tell you is that we used white cardstock and printed a red border inside of which we (and by "we" I mean "she") pasted the photo strip. We kept it simple and were very happy with the results. I can't show you the finished product because—alas!—we mailed all of them that year and have only a crumpled photo on the fridge to show for it.

Variations
You can easily take this basic idea and do your own variations. Grids, vertical strips, etc. For me, the most important part is not the letters, but rather the plan to use individual photos instead of a standard group portrait. The nice thing about putting individual photos into a group later is that you still get to see everyone, but each person can look their best.

Two ways of selecting color in Photoshop: 1.Hex or RGB, and 2. the eydropper tool

Frustrated with color selections? Not seeing eye-to-eye with Photoshop? Consider this free counseling. This simple tutorial will show you two of the most common ways to select a color in Photoshop. If you are like many beginning Photoshop users, you probably do one of two things:

1. You double click the foreground color box (or text color box for text) and then start randomly moving the slider and clicking in the colored circle until you get some approximation of the color you wanted, or
2. You use the eyedropper tool (I) and sample something in an image, often surprised or frustrated that the color you sample looks nothing like what you are seeing.

You can eliminate a lot of the guess work if you take a few minutes to dialogue with Photoshop.

HEX or RGB
When you double click on the foreground color box (pictured at right), you will see the color dialogue box (Note that if you are changing text color, you will find the color box in the top menu bar). If you are perfectly happy sliding and clicking (or scrolling aimlessly through Pantone colors), then go about your sloppy ways. If, on the other hand, you want a specific color—perhaps one that you found in a book like the Color Index or on a site like Colourlovers—you can get that exact color by typing it in the box for the HEX or the RGB values.

RGB and Hex represent the values of red, green, and blue, but in two different ways. For RGB, you will enter a number separately for red, green, and blue. For Hex, you will enter a series of letters and/or numbers (after a number sign) that represent the value of red, green, and blue in pairs. In other words, they represent RRGGBB. But let's not get theoretical.

Look the image below (you can click it to enlarge):
On the left, I have indicated the slide-and-click method of just eyeballing it. On the right, I show you where to enter the Hex or RGB numbers (note: It's one or the other. No need to do both.) You might wonder why I don't mention the boxes for Lab or CMYK. The reason is that only a happy minority knows how to use Lab (a color space so rich and complex that it even includes imaginary colors), and CMYK tends to be used more in the domain of professional printing.

The eyedropper tool
But what if the exact color you want is in your photo? That's when you need the eyedropper tool. The keyboard shortcut for eyedropper tool is "I." With the tool selected, you can click anywhere in an image and sample that color. The problem comes when the eyedropper says you're seeing red and you are sure that your eye is seeing pink. Or maybe a seemingly pessimistic Photoshop sees an ugly brown in a rose petal where you see a sunny yellow. When that happens, some people tend to click and click, getting angrier by the minute that Photoshop can't see the right color. The fact is, when Photoshop sees one thing and you see another, you are both right. Photoshop is merely averaging color values differently than your eye.

So let's learn to make your eye and Photoshop get along a little better.
Let's use this picture of roses:
I want to sample the color from the point you see in the following image:
The most important thing to realize is that the point sample typically is often set to 3x3 pixels. If your image is big, 3x3 pixels may be more precise than what you see (and yes, you can even sample a single pixel, but I doubt you will ever need to). At 3x3, you might pick up a small variation in color that doesn't look like the color you want. To change that, you can select from a pull-down menu in the eyedropper tool menu bar at the top:
Unfortunately for Elements users, you only have two choices (3x3 and 5x5)—and although those numbers might not differ greatly, the greater sizes in Photoshop will. Here is some text sampled from the exact same point on the rose, but using different pixel sizes:
Note the variation in color. Now try this on your own photo. You will soon get a better feeling for the sample size that best matches your vision. You'll learn to appreciate Photoshop, and it will respond to your wishes.

Take-out photo is now open at Etsy

Remember the ABCs of Paris project? Well, although I would still like a book deal, I have decided to open an Etsy store with them in the meantime. All 26 letters are currently posted in 5x5 inch format so people can choose their favorite letter(s) and maybe even spell out a word. Coming soon to the store: alternate versions of each letter for those who want to spell something with more than one of the same letter but don't want to repeat the same image. Also, down the road, look for a poster with the complete alphabet. I will put the link in my sidebar.

Selecting a color palette with the help of Colourlovers

A sample of the colourlovers pack of Moo minicards. So much cooler than stealing Martha Stewart paint chips.

If you plan on doing the "Dots" October Monthly Special (and I hope you do), you will find yourself thinking about color. Not that you have to reserve some of the dots for color, but either way you will be making color choices. If you use color photos and the palette clashes from one image to the next, the end result may seem a bit "off." And you don't have to be a designer to sense the discord.

But how confident are you at choosing colors? Unless you're like my color-genius mother-in-law (who seems to have perfect recall of multiple paint decks and fabric swatches in the same way that some people have perfect pitch), you may find yourself stumped when faced with a color choice. And that's where Colourlovers comes in...

screen grab from colourlovers.com

Colourlovers.com is an amazingly rich site, complete with a blog that I have subscribed to ever since I finally got with the whole blogosphere thing. I especially love the palettes. Readers have submitted well over a half million palettes (you heard me right, more than 563,266 and counting) for your consideration.

The inventive color names are fun in their own right. I have always found the names of my wife's beauty products amusing (e.g. "I'm not really a waitress" nail polish), but with more than 500,000 palettes, the colourlovers site has got quirky names way beyond your standard beauty store fare. Here's a sampling:

• interest in voodoo
• more junk mail
• zombies
  
• Place de la Concorde
  
• analogic Assumption

You get the idea.

When you find a palette you like, you can click on it and see the HEX and RGB values for each color. Don't know what to do with those numbers? Check back for my next post: a "Starter" about sampling and changing colors.

Postscript:
Thanks to Lindsay, for pointing out the Adobe Kuler site/app. Check out the video intro about it.