Difference Blending for Backgrounds

[Fulltimer]

My layout can be found here in the Members Gallery, using the stars.
TFL
Lois

http://www.scrappersguide.com/forums...php?photo=5946

[NMarti]

Lois
Those stars are just fantastic! Excellent job!

[Sissy]

Lois, what a creative idea to use your difference blending backgrounds for the star. Very nice. I loved your layout, too.

[Fulltimer]

Thank you so much ladies.

Nancy - is there a way to save the selection outline, once you have a good one, or have cleaned it up? On each star, I had to go back & create another selection.

Sissy - I will go ahead and upload my Dec Heart Filigree star for the ornament sharing, since I didn't get another one made. This is the one used in the lower left of my LO.

Your stars are just beautiful.

[NMarti]

Lois
Sorry I haven't been here much so I didn't see your post. I guess the way I would do it is to make a new layer once you have the selection and fill it with a color. You can then drag that to a new document and save it as a layered psd. Then just open that document each time and copy the selection onto your new background, select it with ctrl+j and then you can actually delete the original layer you drug in because you no longer need it. I'm certain there is probably a better way to do it but I'm so tired I can't even think straight right now so off the top of my head that's how I would do it. I'm sure Wendy could explain how to do a custom shape with it.

[msbrad]

Wow! That is really cool.
I will have to save this and give it a try. It is sure to take me awhile though.
Thanks, Nancy
m

[Lynn]

Thanks Nancy for the tutorial. This was a lot of fun to play with tonight. I forgot all about my headache :-) I will play around with this some more. I also did this using different layers and different types of gradients with transparent layers. This is a sample of the same layers with different blending modes and huestaturation layers. There is one background layer, one stripe layer and 1 additional one in the lower right example. The lower left is just colorized.

[senko]

This technique looked so nice in the samples but when I tried it I just kept getting a different gradient instead of adding to the one I started with. Sorry, newbie!! What am I doing wrong?
Thanks
Trish

[Lynn]

Senko, make sure you "change the blend mode of this layer to DIFFERENCE in the box to the right of the linear choices". You can change it to anything other than normal and it should work. Difference works really well.

[Wendy]

Hi Trish ...

Its the blend mode of the gradient tool that you need to set to difference not the layer in the layers palette ...

Select the gradient tool then look at the top of the screen ... where it says Mode: Normal change it to Difference.

Then select any gradient and experiment. ...

If you really want to have fun then try selecting one of the other gradients ... like radial gradient or Diamond gradient.

I'll dig out some of the ones I did a couple of years ago and post them

Wendy