Digital Scrapbooking Tutorial: Recoloring Digital Elements

Lori Whitlock's new files come out today at Jessica Sprague. This week she has Office Oriented Borders and Frames. I use the new borders and frames on these new layouts, and the first page is very straight forward I used them, as is. I love that everything in the collection is neutral colored (yes I think red can be a neutral). It makes these borders and frames easy to use again and again. On my computer, I have a file I call "basics", it's filled with my go to elements that I use again and again. These are exactly the type of things I file in there.

For this second layout I use some of the same elements but this time I recolored them to customize them for the papers used. So you can see how versatile this collection is. 

When  recoloring a digital element there are a number of ways to do it. The first one is a Hue/Saturation Adjustment with Photoshop or similar programs (I have Photoshop CS5). I have already done a tutorial on that technique and you can find it here . Another way to recolor elements is by filling it with the paint bucket. 

To start open the element into Photoshop. I want to change the red to brown and I want it to be the exact shade of brown used in other areas, like the papers or elements. 

So, I click on the foreground box to get the eyedropper tool and hover over the area with the color I want and click, now the color picker dialog box pops open and I click OK  You can make changes at this point if you want to go brighter, lighter or darker too.

Now it's time to use this on my element. I hover over the area I want to fill with the paint bucket tool and click. 

Here are the settings I used for the paint bucket tool.

If yours doesn't look right you can play with the tolerance setting.

This tutorial assumes you know the basics of working with this program, so I you have a little catching up to do head on over to Jessica Sprague and take a class. 

If you want to Print and Cut these elements on your Silhouette machine for a hybrid project just save them as a. png and you can open it up on your mat. 

If you'd like to learn more about how to do this, check out my video I did here.

Here is a list of elements I used and which ones are recolored 

Office Oriented Frame  (recolored)

Office Oriented Notebook Edge (recolored)

Office Oriented Border 16 (recolored)

Fall Fling element #39

Fall Fling Banners

Fall Fling Owl

Fall Fling Pumpkins

Fall Fling Card Element #9- Bushels of fun

Fall Fling Paper #4

Fall Fling Paper #13

Fall Fling Paper #12

Fall Fling Paper # 11

Fall Fling Paper # 8 (recolored)

If you haven't stopped by Lori's Blog yet today you can find it here.
Well that's it for now, tomorrow I'm going to talk about making your digi paper look like velum so stop by and check it out!
Happy crafting!