Weddingbee Blog

To not have your own inspiration board!!!

Do you remember when Mrs. Lemon showed us all how to make an inspiration board the really easy way and then the Photoshop way? Well, I love when you can do things really easily, but it was so hard for me to find the images I loved in the color I wanted, that I knew Photoshop was the way to go.

As always, I wanted to share this little experience with all of you and show you the basic tools you can use to play with and create your own custom inspiration board!

{Image Credits}

So today, I put together some quick instructions on how to make a board, showing some of the options for manipulation of photos, changing colors, and some other goodies. It’s really basic, but if you don’t know anything about Photoshop, it can be useful, so I hope you enjoy! (Click on the images if you don’t have magic reading powers, because I think I left the images too small… LOL.)

I made the tutorial in Photoshop CS3, and here’s the trial version to download. I think you can get 90 days of free Photoshop, and that’s enough to play all you want with your photos! If you end up liking it, you can always go to the Adobe page to follow more tutorials - of course, there’s thousands of those everywhere.

So here we go:

A) You will need to install Photoshop on your computer (if you don’t already have it). There are trials you can download and use for 90 days.

B) Once you have Photoshop installed, you need to open it and select the “NEW” option from the “FILE” menu. This is what you will see:

I already knew the size that I wanted to fit on my blog, so I entered the 650×400 pixels option (that’s the size I wanted so it could fit the blog’s width). Because we are going to use it on the web, the resolution is not very important, so 150dpi is ok.

C) Now that we have a new blank file open, we need to save it, and give it a name. I saved it as “mi mix” (remember to save the project as a PSD file).

D) I had already configured my Photoshop, so it will show my rulers and layers. But if you don’t have them visible, here is where you can find them:

WE ARE READY TO START!

E) Now the first thing I’m going to show you is how to change the image color in case you looove what you see, but it doesn’t match your color palette.

E1) Open your file and create a duplicate of your image. You need to right click on the layer so the menu will show. There you have the ”duplicate layer” option.

E2) Now you go to “Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation”. There, you can play until you’re satisfied with the color, and press “OK”.

E3) If you see parts of the image you want in the original color, you can easily use the erase tool from the icons on your left. If you right click on the image with that tool, you can see the options “size” and “hardness”. If you want soft edges, put 0% hardness and ERASE!!!

E4) Now that your image is ready, you can just save it as a JPG on your computer. See, that was easy!

F) Let’s go back to where we left off. You need to open all the images you want to have on your board in Photoshop. Just go to “File > Open” and search for your images. Once they are open, you can just click on the image layer “grab & drop” and drag the layer inside your canvas for the board.

G) Now that the image is there, if it’s too big for you can just press “CTRL +T” and that will activate the “free transform tool” to make it as small as you want. Remember to choose the corners and keep the “shift” key pressed while you do that so it will expand or contract proportionally.

H) The cool thing about working with layers is that you can move them and rearrange them to go in front or behind the other images.

And… there you go. After playing with these tools for a bit, the first board is HERE!!!

There are so many tools to use and be creative with - just let it flow!!

Have you tried to make your own inspiration board? What program or site did you use?