Thursday, June 26, 2008

Help with the Photo CD coasters

Help With the CD Coasters

I have received lots of email from readers who were particularily interested in making the Photo CD coasters.



Please see: http://christys-thriftydecorating.blogspot.com/2008/06/photo-cd-coasters.html



I mentioned that you could download free photo software from: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/photofiltre.html



It's free, easy to use (with a little practice), quick to install and boot up. My daughter introduced me to this software and showed me a great little trick. Use a color photo, change it to black & white, and keep one item colored. Many of you emailed me about this so I decided to provide my own directions. Here is what it does.
Above is the before photo.

Here is the photo after. Notice I left "one" football jersey orange. I could have left them all orange has well. This is just one great feature that the software offers. Here are the directions.

  • Download the free software
  • Get yourself a colored photo and put it onto your desktop where you know exactly where it is.
  • Open Photofiltre
  • Go to FILE, click on open. You should now be looking at your photo.
  • Go to SELECTION and click SELECT ALL
  • Now RIGHT CLICK on your photograph and click INVERT SELECTION
  • Go To the right of the software and grab the lasso (you know the one, it looks like what the cowboys use)
  • Bring that over to the part you want to color . Use the cursor and outline the item. Please don't worry about getting it perfect, the software will fix it for you in the end. Just try to get it the best you can and the most accurate.
  • Go the the top tools and click FILTER, Go down to COLOR, go over to grayscale.
  • Now go up again to the top and click on SELECTION, go down to HIDE SELECTION

You are now finished. I love this look on the coasters.

Here is another site that show you step by step instructions.

http://i29.tinypic.com/2i6c1zp.png

This free software also does so much more. I'm still experimenting with it and having some fun.

I hope this helps all of you that had questions about this software. Please feel free to email me at clturner3@aol.com if you have any questions.

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3 comments:

  1. Here is a question for you. What if I want multiple things in the picture to stay colored but other things to be black and white. What then?

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  2. If the objects that you want to color are close by, it can be done. Take the lasso tool, outline one object and then move to the next and outline it.
    I've tried it and it does work sometimes and other times it misses parts of the neighboring items. Practice with it and you may get it to work just perfectly.
    Hope this helps.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Cool software program--Thanks for the link! You can get the same effect with Photoshop, or Photoshop Elements, but not for free, and as they say, "Free is a very good price"!

    Another wrinkle: If you have a Publisher-type program, you can superimpose a circle the size of a Cd on your photo before you print. Then all you have to do is cut on the line, and skip the tracing of the circle. I actually did that, and created a template I could move photos into and out of. (Instructions I didn't put in my blog, for the sake of simplicity, but I think you can handle it, lol.)

    ReplyDelete