This is from MOC in 2013, but I thought others might be interested in this still. Happy Friday everyone! I am here with a tutorial on how to create a page using a technique to make your stamps look more realistic. My style leans towards creating layouts that mimic traditional paper pages and I love the look of stamps that go across multiple layers. When you add a digital stamp on top of several layers of paper it won't look real unless you add a small gap next to each lower paper layer like this: There are several methods to achieve this look. I am going to show you the steps that I use which is admittedly involved, but any methods that you want to use to create a small gap is totally fine. First I create a dummy layer on top of everything else. Then I CTRL-click the picture or paper layer in order to get a row of marching ants around the object. When you have the marching ants around either your photo or your piece of paper, select the Dummy Layer on top and then click Edit, Stroke. When the Stroke Form opens, enter a width of about 8 px and select Outside. This creates a thin stroked line all the way around your picture and/or piece of paper. Once you have the stroked lines around the pieces of paper and/or pictures that you want the "Stamped Effect" on, just CTRL-click on the thumbnail of the Dummy Layer, then select your stamp layer (in this case the orange paint under the pop top arrow) and then hit Delete on your keyboard. You can turn off your Dummy layer and you'll see a thin line deleted from your stamped layer. Voila! You're done!
Fun idea - Thanks, Karen! I do this a little differently, but it's great to learn different ways. I wouldn't have thought to use the stroke for this!
I remember this form last year's MOC, Karen. I do it all the time now. love it & really helps with the realistic look!
Thanks for a look at another way to do it. I just make a layer mask on the paint or font and use the eraser tool on a very small round brush and eyeball where to click down the eraser (be sure the layer mask box is active by clicking on it first), hold the shift key and click down again where I want the erasure to end. Very slick and easy to undo by just typing x to change the color and add back what you took away from the mask. I do curves this way minus the shift key, of course.
@Karen - never thought of using a stroke to do this, but so fun to learn new ways to do things. thanks!
@dvhoward - I think I'm going to combine both your method of using the mask and @Karen 's method of using the stroke to make the gap in a non-destructive way... so cool to learn new things! Thanks for the tips. I've always clipped the stamp to the layers and duplicated and clipped to all the underlaying layers and deleted, moved and such. The options you all shared are so much easier.