Friday freeeeebie....? Nonono, mini tutorial!

Hi! How are you doing? We're going to have a long weekend over here, there's bank holiday on Tuesday and my DH takes Monday off, hurrrayyyy!

Hope you're not disappointed that there's no freebie today! I've decided to post it tomorrow since I have another thing I want to share. I've discovered this by accident, just playing around (which is how things usually come in digi LOL!) and I think it's really cool! I've been working on a layout for the gals over at DigiDareYa (if you haven´t checked them out yet, do it as they have some amazing dares! Link is in the left column – The Blogs I Visit). This week is all about funky and I had those cute pics of my two kiddos in the bathtub from couple of days ago, it was the first time they bathed together. So I thought it’d be just perfect for this LO. And I had this idea to include a kind of a shower curtain. Easy to say but….HOW? First I tried luck with drapery folds by Fhung Lie which I had in my files but I didn´t like the effect and decided to make my own. First attempt was purely digi but it didn´t work... So, (okay, I’ll cut the crap:-)) I took a pic of our curtain and started to play around. And here comes my little tutorial about a realistic fold using a photo in PS CS2 (my first tut ever!). The important thing is that the curtain is WHITE (or almost white). If you don’t have any or don’t feel like extracting, feel free to use mine here. It’s a .png file and the extraction is already done in that one. Also, the effect will only work well on light to medium colored papers.
First of all, you need to extract your curtain (if you’re not using the sample above). Here’s how mine looks after the extraction:

I also added a slight drop shadow for the effect but we’re going to do it in the very end. Now open the paper you want to use and place it UNDER the curtain layer. Set the blend mode of the curtain layer to ‘multiply’. Now you should see the paper showing through the curtain with all the shades and highlights. Cool isn’t it? If the shades and highlights are not too visible, increase the contrast of the curtain layer. I increased mine to 45%. Now it looks ok but we’re not done yet. Solids should work fine with just one layer of paper. But if it’s a patterned paper you’ll need to make as many copies as there are folds. Why? Because the pattern ‘ends’ where the fold/shade is and the rest is folded hence you can´t see it, the pattern doesn´t continue, right? So copy the layer with your paper and move the copy on to the next fold. It looks better if you shuffle the paper up or down a little to create an effect of discontinued pattern. And you may also need to rotate the paper a little to adjust it to the folded line. Be careful not to cover the shading. Copy again and move to the next one. Continue until you have all the folds covered. I ended up with 7 copies. Now we need to do some cutting. If you're using a solid paper you can skip the previous steps and go from here. Ctrl+click on the icon of the curtain layer. You should see the ants marching around your selection. Invert the selection by either pressing ctrl+shift+I or from the menu bar Select>Inverse. Select the first layer with the paper and press Delete. Do the same for all the copies (for solids only once of course:-)). When you’re done you should have only the part of the curtain covered by the paper and it should look similar to mine below - I’m using a paper from Funky Funky by Sausan Designs:

Isn´t it cool, huh?:-) If you don’t understand anything please feel free to contact me – either leave a comment here or, which is easier for me, send me an email (left column under My profile).

Thanks for poppin' in and see you tomorrow at FREEBIE TIME!