Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Treasury and a tutorial on the same

I'm quite enjoying this new instructional vibe I've got going on, so today as well as showing you a stunning treasury, I'm also going to show you exactly how to get capped images of a treasury using Photoshop! I've tried to make the instructions simple, bearing in mind that most of you probably have only used Photoshop for improving your images.

Okay- so the first thing you do is open the page with your treasury- you'll notice there's a button on your keyboard that says 'print screen'- hit that. Now go to Photoshop, open a new canvas (File>New) -when the prompt comes up make sure it says 'clipboard' in the preset bar, then click OK.

Now paste your printscreen cap into the canvas by either holding down Control and presing 'V', or go to Edit>Paste.

Pretty spiffy huh? Well hold on to your pants, it gets better. Go to your tools palette and select the marquee tool, the one that looks like a dotted square:

Now click on the canvas and drag to create a square the same size as the treasury area you can see. (I know you can't see all of it right now, don't worry!) You can move the dotted lines by putting your mouse inside it and click-dragging it till it lines up.


Now go to Select>Inverse. This will flip the dotted line. Now go to Edit>clear. Everything but your treasury selection will disspear. Good huh?

Okay, now we're going to move that piece of treasury so there's room for the bottom half, so go to Edit>Rotate canvas> '90 CCW'. Now go to Edit>Transform>Rotate 90 CW'.

Now go to your tools palette again- there's a black arrow with an ornate plus sign (called the 'move tool') next to the marquee square:

Select the move arrow, then click-and-drag on the image in your canvas to bring it up to the top of the canvas. Now you should have this:


Nifty! Now go back to the treasury page on the internet and scroll down a bit so you can see the rest of the treasury, making sure you can see a little bit of what you've already captured. Hit print screen and follow the above steps again to clear out the unwanted stuff and rotate the image. Now move it till it's under the first piece, so they match up.

You might find it hard to match it up, so here's a tip- go to your layers palette (the little window on your right- if it's not there just hit F7 or go to Window>Layers, and it should pop up. Where there's a little drop down that says 'opacity', hit that and slide the slider to about 70%. Now click-hold-and-drag until it's layered over the other piece and lines up perfectly. If you're finding it hard to get a steady hand to lay it perfectly, you can get close and then use the arrows on your keyboard to nudge it till it's in place.


Now you've done that, bring your opacity back up to 100% and you can see a complete treasury. Wow! Well hang on, tiger- we need to stick it all together. First thing, go to Layer>Flatten image, and it will compact everything nicely. Now go to your crop tool- this little feller is in your tools palette, he looks like this:


Select that tool, then go to your canvas and click-and-drag till you have a border around your image, like this:

You can use the tiny squares to latch on and drag the dimensions around, so you can get it perfectly neat. Now hit enter- the whole piece will crop, and you'll get yourself a lovely whole treasury!

Treasury made by noblegnome.

One last step- save your treasury on your hard drive and upload it to your blog!

If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments and I'll get back to you as soon as I can!

4 comments:

JanetDavies said...

Hey Sparrow Salvage,
I wanted to pop in from my googlereader to let you know how much I am enjoying your blog. I really appreciate the tutorials!

Hopemore Studio said...

Great tutorial. I may have to scour the treasuries and find a favorite to share on my blog. I am a blogging newbie, so I'm trying to soak in as much as I can. Thanks so much,

Angie

Chrisy said...

Well explained here! I use the FireShot tool which is very simple...

Joanne Blackeby said...

I enjoy following your blog, and thank you for this tutorial, it was a great help to me.