The Benefits of Black and White

I had a bunch of different pictures from Christmas. As usual, it's a chaotic time, and colors, sizes, and shapes abound... not always harmoniously. One solution, I've found, is to make a large part of the layout be black and white. That way, whatever you introduce as the main focus won't be so jarring... Here, the presents close-up under the tree was a great picture in and of itself, but it made all my people pictures seem pale and faded, and they were getting lost. Turning the main picture into black and white allowed the yellow, red, and blue in the picture of Allen to jump out, and also gave me the idea to use the ornament as a typographic element.

The ornament, by the way, is one that I made with a glass ornament from Michael's, filled with clear varnish and PearlEx, then swirled all around with alcohol inks on the outside. I made a bunch of them for Christmas presents, and they turned out pretty cool!

A couple of tricks here: duplicating the main image layer, then desaturating the top one so all you see is the black and white, but then erasing the black and white to let the color from the layer beneath shine through. Easier than selecting an area--especially a complex one, like this was, with all the pieces between the pine needles, then doing select-->inverse, and desaturating the rest all on one layer. For the letters, I opened another picture which contained a scan of an alcohol ink background, and typed the letters on a different layer. I selected one letter at a time with the magic wand, then just switched to the alcohol ink layer and copied the selection, which I then pasted into this layout here. Easy peasy!

By the way, if you ever have any questions about what I've done on these layouts, please leave me a comment!