CU OK Curled Ribbons

Today I had time to photograph and extract some curled ribbons because Set 1 and Set 2 were so very popular. There are 7 ribbons ready to recolor!

Download the CU OK Curled Ribbons Set III HERE

Or HERE

CU OK Tree Templates Part II

As promised here’s the second set of tree templates. I did not include the .psd files because for some reason the .zip was over 80 mb! The individual .pngs are in the zip; you will just need to place each .png on it’s own layer in your document!

Download the Second set of CU OK Tree Templates HERE

or HERE

CU OK Layered Tree Templates

Tonight’s freebie is a set of 5 tree layered templates for your Fall kits or layouts. Included in the .zip is the .psd and individual .pngs for each of the 5 trees. I have another set of trees that I am going to post tomorrow so make sure you stop back by to grab part 2!

Download the 1st set of Tree Layered Templates HERE

Or HERE

CU OK Glitter Edge Styles

Well I didn’t get to those halftone brushes yet but I did finish up another set of styles that I had sitting on the old laptop for awhile. They include flat and corrugated cardboard with several different colored glitter edges, plus a plain flat and corrugated cardboard style without glitter. I also included 3600 x 3600 jpegs of both the plain flat and corrugated cardboards. Tip: If the glitter edge is too big for the element you apply the style to, scale the “stroke” down to make it smaller.  You can do this in PS or PSE. Enjoy!

Download the CU OK Glitter Edge Styles for PS/PSE HERE

or HERE

CU OK Real Felt Layer Styles

I’m still working on the halftone brushes and that will wrap up the halftone series. But tonight’s freebie is a set of felt layer styles for PS/PSE that I made using a piece of real felt that I scanned and made into a seamless pattern. There are 32 colored styles in this set, plus the seamless grey tile I used for those who cannot use styles.  I’m still working on the halftone brushes and that will wrap up the halftone series. Next up after them are some tree doodles and templates. Busy, busy and hopefully I will have time to keep transferring stuff to my new laptop!

Download the CU OK Real Felt Layer Styles for PS/PSE HERE

or HERE

Quick Halftone Tutorial for PSE

My new Laptop arrived yesterday! Yay! I love it! It is so much faster and so far Windows 7 is a big improvement over Vista! I spent all evening last night installing programs and transferring files to the new laptop. I’m nowhere near done yet but I did sit down this morning and work on that tutorial to create halftones in PSE.  There are a bunch of tutorials out there that show how to make them in Photoshop and many involve converting your document into a Bitmap using a halftone screen.  While you can convert to Bitmap in PSE, halftone screen is not an option. But there are ways to do it that are so simple you will be making halftones in minutes! I’m using PSE 7 for this tutorial.  First I created a new document (3600 x 3600) with a transparent background and chose the gradient tool:

I chose the black to white gradient that is found in the default gradient palette. Then I chose my shape (for this one I used the radial gradient which looks like a circle in the options bar). I drag from the upper left corner to about 1/2 of the way to the middle of the document at an angle to draw the gradient.

Then go to “Filter – Pixelate - Color Halftone”

A window will pop up where you can enter values.  The Max. Radius is where you determine how big your “dots” are going to be. I changed the value to 75 pixels. Now change all the values in the Channels to Zero and press OK.

And Viola! Instant halftone!

You are not restricted to black and white though.  Play with different gradients and gradient shapes! Here I used the diamond gradient and dragged the gradient out from the middle a few inches using a default orange/yellow gradient.

Again, go to Filter – Pixelate – Color Halftone.  Since we want this gradient to be colored, press the default button in the popup menu to repopulate the channels with the default settings and again enter a large value for the Max. Radius. I used 100.

And here’s the result! Pretty cool eh?

You can convert this to greyscale and you have a pretty cool overlay that you can use again and again!

Here’s a PDF of this post so you can follow along while you make your own halftones!

Download the PDF of the Halftone Tutorial HERE

I hope this was helpful! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask me!

CU OK Regular Halftone Overlays

Here’s the set of more traditional Halftone patterned overlays. My new laptop is scheduled to arrive today so it may be a day or two before I get another freebie posted while I load all the software and files onto the new computer. I also may need to take some time to learn how Windows 7 works! Everyone says it is so much better than Vista and I sure hope it is! My favorite Windows OS was XP. We still have a couple of computers in the house that run XP and have never had a problem with them! Anyway.. here’s the overlays. They are all in .png format and as always, play with your blend modes and adjust opacity to get the look you want! The first one in the preview is how the overlay would look with no blend mode or opacity changes and the rest have been changed to achieve the monochrome look. Oh, and I apologize for the crappy preview yesterday but I was in a hurry to get the post done before I had to go to work.  I’m looking at it now and can’t believe anyone downloaded the Funky Halftone Overlays because of the terrible preview. But I’m glad you did!

Download the CUOK Halftone Overlays HERE

or HERE

Funky Halftone Overlays – CU OK!

Lately I have been obsessed with all things retro and have been trying to figure out how to make some halftone brushes and designs.  I played with the halftone filter in Photoshop but I was just not happy with the results. Then I found a couple of cool tutorials on YouTube and found out it is not a hard as I thought it would be to make cool halftone patterns. I made a bunch of overlays and I will be posting them the next couple of days, as well as (hopefully) some brushes. You may want to adjust the opacity for these to achieve the look you want.  I saved them as .pngs but the .zip was HUGE so I resaved them as .jpeg files instead. Tomorrow’s set will be less funky and more traditional looking halftones. And if I have time, I will post a tutorial on how to create these halftones in PSE.

Download CU OK Funky Halftone Overlays HERE

or HERE

CU OK Stapled Construction Paper Alpha

It’s been awhile since I’ve offered an alpha so I thought I’d make one from my latest style set.  It has all caps A-Z and 0-9 in individual .pngs and looks like it’s been stapled to the page. I also included the single staple so you can add more if you like!

Download the CU OK Stapled Construction Paper Alpha HERE

or HERE

CU OK Construction Paper Styles

Since the Textured Cardstock styles were so popular I made a big set of Construction Paper styles to go with them.  40 colored styles in 1 tiny 300 kb .asl file. I made these from a piece of construction paper that I scanned, desaturated and made into a seamless tile. Also included is the grey tile I used for the styles.  If you have questions about using/loading styles please refer to yesterday’s post where I give you some links to some great info!

Download the CU OK Construction Paper Styles HERE

or HERE

Where do these layer styles, patterns go??

I have received a bunch of questions this week about styles and patterns. I guess I just took for granted that everyone knew where to put them and how to use them! Sorry about that! First of all, .asl (styles), .csh (custom shapes) and .pat (pattern) files will only work in Photoshop or PSE. They won’t work in PSP. And where they go varies depending on what version of PSE you have. It’s been a long time since I’ve opened up PSE but I found the easiest way to load them was with Graffi’s Add-O-Matic! You just drag your actions, pattern file, style file, brushes, plug-ins into the box and press a button and it puts everything in the right folder. Easy Peasy! If you don’t want to pay 10.99 for the program you can install these presets yourself. There are several fabulous resources out there that will walk you through the process. Here’s a roundup of a few of the best: (Links will take you to the specific content)

Hummie’s World – Hummie really is the Go-To person for all things PSE. She has TONS of information on her site and her tutorials are second to none. She also offers a very reasonable subscription with additional tutorials that you should check out and an active forum and gallery. She has an excellent section on installing plug-ins (including styles). Where you see an icon with pencil/book, click on it for a .pdf that you can print out for reference.

About.Com – Sue Chastain writes for About and has a weekly newsletter that she emails with tips and reviews of several different graphic programs. There are detailed instructions on how to install shapes, styles, etc. in various versions of PSE.

Scrapper’s Guide – Linda Sattgast is another excellent tutorial writer and has a great free forum and offers subscriptions and classes on CD.

Adobe Help Center – Personally I haven’t had much luck with Adobe Help for Photoshop or Illustrator but the sections for PSE explain how to scale styles, remove styles, etc. It’s worth a look!

It’s important to remember that you may have to restart PSE a couple of times for the layer styles to show up, or you may have to rebuild the MediaDatabase file (Instructions in Hummie’s tutorial).

If you use the full version of Photoshop you can just load styles using the Preset manager or the style palette. You can apply layer styles to shapes, text, or any element in your layer. The layer must not be a “Background” layer however. If the layer is labled “Background” in your layer palette, double-click on the layer to convert it to a regular layer.

I’m not really a tutorial writer but hopefully these links have directed you to some who are excellent tutorial writers and can help you work with the free presets you download here on my blog! If you have any other links or great sites on using/loading layer styles feel free to comment and provide the link!

CU OK Textured Cardstock Styles for PS/PSE

Ok remember this morning’s post (at about 1:00am and I was complaining of a headache from staring at the computer all day)? I said there had to be an easier way to make your elements look like textured cardstock. I played a little more with the cardstock and fiddled enough until I was happy with a seamless cardstock pattern.  Then I added a little bevel, a little shadow, and a little color to make a big set of cardstock styles! I say big because there are over 30 colors but they only take 1/2 mb of space on your computer.  How much space would you need for 30 sheets of colored cardstock? I’m guessing quite a bit and my computer is getting dangerously close to being full to the gills of stuff! I really love styles too because they are so easy.  You don’t have to open any other files to clip to your elements… One click and your element is good to go! (see examples in the preview). I also included the grey seamless tile that I used for these styles if you would like to try it out in your own program for those who don’t use PS or PSE.

Download the CU OK Textured Cardstock Styles for PS/PSE HERE

or HERE

CU OK Real Cardstock Doodled Flowers and Leaves

This freebie took entirely too long and my head is throbbing.  I thought it was a good idea but the more I think about it I made it much harder than it had to be. ** smiles ** Story of my life! I doodled some flowers and leaves in Illustrator and printed them out on 8 x 8 textured cardstock.  Then I cut them out and photographed them under harsh light to give them a strong shadow.  I then brought the photos into Photoshop where I cropped, desaturated and adjusted the levels of each.  I then used the pen tool to trace around the shapes and extract them.  I then created a shadow layer under the flower layer that resembled the real shadow produced in the original photograph.  The idea was to make the flowers and leaves look as much like real cardstock as possible. But I couldn’t flatten them because when you recolor the flower, the shadow would be recolored too! So in this set are 10 flowers and leaves and 10 matching shadows to place under them.  You can leave the shadows off if you don’t want to use them and if you like you can adjust the opacity of the shadows if they are too harsh. Here’s an example of how you can layer them and I added one of my buttons to it (click on picture for BIG view).

Does it look realistic? Are the shadows too strong? I’m not convinced. But anyway they are all in .png form and greyscale, ready for you to recolor or add a pattern to! 

Also, I have one tiny tiny request.  If you have any questions regarding my TOU, how to use the freebies in Photoshop or PSE, or anything else – can you please drop me an email?  Sometimes it is hard to track you down when you comment on the blog with a question and I find it so much easier to respond to emails.  Speaking of which, I have several to answer right now so I’m gonna post this and get to them so I can head to bed!

Download the CU OK Cardstock Flowers and Leaves w/shadows HERE

or HERE

CU OK Retro Slide Overlays!

I was thumbing through the Filter Forge Library and found a very cool filter called Celluloid Dreams.  You can create retro looking slides and add scratches, noise, etc.  So I created three different slides that have scratches that you can lay over your layout or paper to give it an old time look and I went through and erased the “filtered” part so there are three blank frames.  You can use the blank frames as a clipping mask or recolor however you like!  The preview shows how they will look over a picture.  Each are 3600 x 3600 and are CU OK!

Download the Retro Slide Overlays HERE

Or HERE

CU OK Halloween Styles, Patterns, and Image Tiles!

Well I’ve never received so many comments from a post where there was no freebie as I did on this morning’s post! I got up this afternoon (for those who are new to the blog I work the midnight shift) and had TONS of emails, blog comments and a phenomenal number of license purchases. I can’t thank you all enough for the positive comments I’ve received! I would like to address a couple of recurring questions before I get to today’s freebie:

Q: I have items in a store or on my blog using your CU Freebies! Do I need to take them down or remove them from the store?

A: Of course not! I don’t expect designers to remove items that they may have used before I “changed the rules.” That would be completely unfair and unreasonable. And there were THOUSANDS of downloads of my CU freebies before I changed the rules. There is no way I can be assured a designer came back to my blog after she/he downloaded my freebies to even be aware of the new requirements after the download. I’m just saying, if you’ve read the new terms and are designing something new with old CU downloads – Use your conscience! I’m not going to hunt you down (probably – lol) and make you aware of the new terms. Believe it or not – I do have much better things to do!

Q: I don’t sell my designs in a store but just give them away as freebies. Do I need a Commercial Use License?

A: Technically, yes.  Very few designers allow you to design freebies with Personal Use Only products. Am I going to hunt you down or call you out on it? No. Especially if you provide credit to me for the resources as required.  That’s a wishy washy answer but honestly if you are giving things away out of the goodness of your heart for this fabulous digiscrap community I don’t want to discourage that! I know how expensive this hobby can be and will never break even with all of the programs, filters, hardware, etc. that I have purchased in the past two years to provide freebies. But I enjoy doing it!

Also, it hasn’t been asked but if you want to use my freebies for tutorials (free or paid) you do not need to purchase a Commercial Use license. I just ask that you direct your readers to my blog for the downloads.

Anyway, thanks also to Vaybs who explained how to allow anonymous comments on 4 shared. I do read all the comments on the blog, Facebook, 4 shared, and filesavr so don’t feel you must comment more than once! Now to the freebie! There are 24 glossy styles in halloween colors for Photoshop/PSE and also a pattern (.pat) set that is flat in the same patterns. And for those who do not use Photoshop or PSE there are 24 seamless image tiles in .png form that are 300 x 300 pix each so that you can import them into your own program.

Download the Halloween Styles/Patterns/Tiles HERE

or HERE

A Few Changes around Here…

I’ve been contemplating what to do with my freebies lately. I’ve been discouraged by the ratio of downloads to comments but that is nothing new and from speaking with some other designers on Twitter it seems that I get many more than most.  I thought that 5% of people thanking someone for a freebie was pretty sad until I heard that another designer exceed 1000 downloads and received about a dozen comments. Really? That’s pretty sad. I’ve also been informed by my loyal readers of several TOU violations regarding my CU freebies. All I ever asked for was credit and evidently for some that was even too much to ask. The violation is generally rectified after I email the designer and is an oversight.  But it’s still frustrating.

In light of all this I thought about what to do. I really enjoy designing freebies and I really appreciate those who thank me every single day.  (You know who you are! I love you guys!) I didn’t want to take the blog down and punish those readers who really do appreciate my freebies. I thought about making everything Personal Use only but then what to do about all the previous downloads that I’ve allowed CU for? It would be a mess and too confusing.  There really is no perfect solution and I don’t want the stress of selling my things in a store.  Hopefully the solution that I came up with will be agreeable to everyone.

It’s simple.  All my downloads will remain free and links will stay up as long as I can afford to host them. You can download anything you want and play with them, read the terms of use, and decide if you want to use them Commercially.  If you want to use my freebie as a CU item, you can purchase a CU license and design items that you can sell or give away.  All the info is included under the Commercial Use License Tab above.  It’s basically an honor system. I know that most designers are honest and trustworthy and will abide by the terms. 

Hopefully you all won’t be too upset with this change. I feel the license is reasonable. Unlimited CU Use for all the CU freebies (past and future) for $20 or individual licenses for $2 per download. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.  (Don’t beat me up too bad!)

CU Funky Frame Brushes and .pngs

6 brushes for PS/PSE and greyscale .pngs about 2500 pix ea.

Download HERE

or HERE

CU Fall Leaves Set

As promised, here’s the set of Fall leaves I made with the shapes and styles from my earlier post. I figure some of you may not want to go through the trouble of making your own leaves and might just want some already finished!

Download the CU Fall Leaves HERE

or HERE

Build your own Fall Leaves!

Today’s freebie is a set of fall leaves shapes and styles for Photoshop or PSE. I created the shapes by scanning some leaves in my yard and also from tracing some shapes from public domain illustrations with the pen tool in Photoshop. Then I found some appropriate Filter Forge filters for seamless patterns to apply to the shapes to give them a leaf texture. The .csh and .asl for Phototshop/PSE are included in the zip as well as .png shapes and the seamless image tiles I used for the styles for those who don’t use PS/PSE. And if you don’t want to make your own leaves I have also made a set of CU leaves using this set that will be available in my next post!

Download the CU .asl/.csh and pngs HERE

or HERE

CU Doodle Scrap Borders

Today’s freebie is a set of 6 doodle borders that I drew in Illustrator. They are nearly 3600 x 3600 each to border your scrap layouts or papers. I also created a Photoshop Brush Set than can be downloaded from my Deviant Art Account HERE.

Download the CU Doodle Borders HERE

or HERE

More CU Patterned Grunge Overlays

As promised, a set of overlays using my latest set of Photoshop Brushes. They are transparent .pngs but I placed them over a colored layer for preview purposes. Enjoy!

Download the PatternedGrunge Overlay Set HERE

or HERE

CU Patterned Grunge Brushes 2

Today’s freebie is another set of patterned grunge brushes. Just drag your brush over the canvas and viola! See the first set for screen shots on how to use them. And for the non PS/PSE users check the next post for the overlays! There are 6 Hi-Res brushes in this set.

Download the CU Patterned Grunge Brush Set HERE

or HERE