CU Curled and Ribbon Set

The cord is in the mail so to speak but I still haven't received it so the overlays are still sitting there on my laptop hard drive waiting, waiting.... I'm not a very patient person.  LOL.  Today's freebie is a set of 8 curled ribbons that I photographed in the new light box and extracted.  They were requested recently by Valerian70 so I hope she reads this and snags them.  I have also been asked a few times recently what method I use to extract my elements.  I don't really have only one way but  my mostest favorite way to extract recently in CS3 using the following steps:  I first crop the photo so that only the element I am extracting is in the photo and as much of the background is cropped as possible.  Then I zoom in to 100% and choose the freehand pen tool.  I check the magnetic box and tweak the magnetic settings depending on the element.  Then I slowly draw around the element with the pen tool until the path is closed.  I then use the path tools to delete anchor points, move them, convert them, etc.  When I am satisfied that the path pretty much matches the edges of my element I make a selection from the path and smooth it by 2-3 pixels.  I then invert the selection and press delete.  It is very time consuming yes but I think it produces much nicer edges than the magic wand tool.  Anyway, I don't know if this explanation makes any sense to anyone and it won't be very useful for those of you who don't have Photoshop.  But that's how I do it. 

Anyway, here's the freebie.  The ribbons are shiny but silver so they should be recolored easily to match your layouts or kits.  Drop shadows are for preview purposes only.

Download the CU Curled Ribbon Set HERE

or HERE