Watermark Take Two

I have been playing around with FotoFlexer lately, as you can tell since I have a blog header and a signature line now.  Just now I realized that I have been over looking using the layers feature to create a watermark once, save it to my computer, then adding it to a picture as another layer.  It was a quick process, so now I also have a watermark figured out.  This is my original attempt at a watermark.

Here is the watermark that I have saved as an image with a transparent background.

All I have to do is load my picture into FotoFlexer, edit it as desired, then in the layers tab select Add Images, find my watermark, load it in, position, and save.  No more going through the steps of inserting the sticker, changing the color, typing the text, selecting the font, and so on.  Tried doing this for real and it doesn't work.  My picture gets all wonky and cropped in half.  I'll have to mess around with it more.  So, for now I'm just using Publisher to upload the picture and watermark then group the two together and save as picture.

Adding a Signature

There are a whole bunch of blogs that have a signature line after each post that they write.  I would like to have a really cute one with some 3D looking digital scrapbooking element, but this will do for now.  This is the tutorial that I used to create my signature, but I used FotoFlexer to make it.  The butterfly sticker from the FotoFlexer collection.  I got hung up on where to get the HTML coding for the image so I'm going to share my steps on how to do that.  Looking back at the tutorial I found that it said to "upload the image to an image hosting website such as photobucket.com" but I don't use one so I will share my steps anyways.

1. Open a new page in your blog
2. Insert the picture file from your computer
3. Select the HTML button (if you use blogger it's in the upper left, next to compose)
4. Now you have the HTML code!
5. If you want your signature on the left margin as opposed to centered you will need to edit the code.
• The code likely reads <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
• Change it to read <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">

So I got this far and realized that there is a nasty border and shadow around my signature so I found this tutorial on getting rid of it.  This tutorial will walk you through everything you need to do to get a signature line on your blog posts.  Now that I've removed the shadow my signature is in a white box whereas my background is light blue.  I had this really cute "sparkling" butterfly which seems to be causing the issue with transparency coming from FotoFlexer so I reverted to a simple sticker without the sparkle.  But I wanted to show you the sparkle anyways.

This is inserted as an image instead of the cool signature line deal so it's a real mess.  But isn't the sparkle so AWESOME!

The story behind butterflies and me goes back to planning our wedding.  I feel like a lot of "themes" are over done (no offense if you used any of the themes I dis, it just wasn't right for us), and didn't want to have an event theme but needed something to tie things together a little bit more than just "blue."  Doves didn't work, we didn't have "a place" like the beach, or any of the other wedding themes that were floating around in 2007.  Ever since we had a "blue butterfly" wedding we have been receiving blue butterflies for decoration, household goods, etc.  I've even bought some of it, but I was never really "into" butterflies and I'm still not, but it's a symbol that has stuck.

This project turned out to take a lot longer than I had hoped/expected and now that's after 1am it is time to call it a night.  I may be back tomorrow to edit this craziness a little bit and delete all the draft posts that have been created in the process of figuring out how to add a signature to my posts.  

Photo Editing Trials

One way to ensure that a crafters work is never used by someone else as their own is to add a watermark to it.  (I've even heard about people stealing pictures of children off blogs to pass them as their own.)  As I am working towards becoming a blog worth following I decided that I should start adding some sort of watermark to my work.  When I got my new camera (Canon Rebel EOS) I asked my brother for some editing software recommendations, the only one I remember is GIMP, so I downloaded that and realized that it's far to complicated for my quick projects.  So, I ended up googling "free online photo editing" and found FotoFlexer, you don't even need an account to use it.  I've only done basic stuff and need to read up more on photo editing in general.  You probably noticed the debut of a watermark starting with my most recent post Card Making Machine.  It's a really simple watermark as it is only text, maybe I'll get around to something with a graphic in it someday.

Steph's Simple Photo Editing using FotoFlexer
First, you will sign in, if you have an account but an account is not required to use this program.  I haven't explored the benefits of creating an account.
Then, you will upload a photo, or start here if you don't have an account.
The first tab you will work with is the Basic Tab.  Here I select Auto Fix, and then crop the image by selecting Crop, drawing a box, and hitting "Crop Selected Area."

Then we move on to the Decorate tab.  This is where I add text as my watermark.  When you select the "Text" button you will have three things pop up.  The first is a text box where you can enter your text, the second is where your text will appear in a moveable, shapeable text box, and the third is a Text Options box where you will select formatting options.

 

Finally you will save your picture, once it will appear like you are saving it to FotoFlexer but a standard save menu will appear after saving it here allowing you to save it to your computer.  Do not change the name of the file between the first and second saves, it will not work correctly.

Here is the final product from the above editing.  I used the Kleenex box for packaging my Christmas and birthday gifts to my bestie, as it was the best box I had laying around for the job.

Card Making Machine

This weekend has been busy with card making.  I made up a set of thank you notes for Melodi's birthday earlier in the week and finished them up this weekend, they are at the bottom of the Melodi's Second Birthday Party post.  A couple of birthday cards were also on my to do list, one for my grandma and one for my bestie Liz.  Finally, I finished up my Christmas thank yous, but that was only because the last package arrived and I had some extras from December/January left laying around (I really did get the rest of them out earlier than 2 months after Christmas).

Birthday Card for Grandma
This is an original design of mine.  I used the Cricut cartridge Straight from the Nest for the bird and used the CCR for to cut all layers.  Any sentiment could be used, I used the same "happy birthday" as on the next card, stamped in brown on the inside.  I used the brown card from the DCWV Solid Box of Cards, a Bazzill brown from my scraps, the cream and green both came from the DCWV Latte matstack, and the red goes a long way back as it was in my scraps from my WSU graduation announcements.  The green ribbon is from an Offray microspool.

Birthday Card for Bestie
I found this pinned for a hello card and when I was looking through my Papercrafts: Cards board for a quick and easy card it is the one that won.  Once again the card is form the DCWV Solid Box of Cards.  The pink and green ribbons are from Offray microspools and the yellow is from an Offray Spoolo' Ribbon.  The flowers are form the $1 bin at Michaels.

Christmas Thank You Set

This was a pin that used a ladybug and the sentiment "thank you."  The cards are from the $1 bin at Michaels.  The green paper is from a cardstock stack of basic colors, embossed using my Cuttlebug.  I don't remember where the red ribbon came from, but there are two different sizes there.  The patterned paper came from my scrap stash as I used it for photo ornaments and layouts for Christmas 2010.  When I started writing them I decided that I needed to score a line in so that the card front could flip up easily, so I scored the line and glued down the top.

Did you notice the new watermarks on my photos?  I did them in FotoFlexer.  More on that in my next post.