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Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Cluster Freaks Rejoice!

If you love clustering as much as I do, then you may be like I once was, spending oodles of time opening up all the delicious elements and dragging them one by one onto my canvas. One day, I finally had an ah-ha moment and realized there is a much simpler way to do this if you use Photoshop.

First, I Go to Files > Scripts > Load Files into Stack


This will bring up a dialog box that looks like this


I hit the browse button and find the folder on my computer that has all the ellies that I want to play with.


Hit okay and then get another dialog box that looks like this:


Hit okay and then let the computer do all the work. You end up with something like this:


We're almost there. Open up your main background paper. Then go back to the stacked elements and go to your layers palette. Select all the layers:


Then, using your move tool, simply drag your stacked elements from the canvas over to your background paper.


From there, just start moving, shrinking, twisting, and shadowing until you come up with clustery masterpiece! Works great to load individual alpha elements to create awesome titles, too!

And one awesome extra perk using this system is that all your elements will have the original file name on them in your layers palette. This can make crediting much simpler.

7 comments:

Christine Smith said...

This is interesting. I normally just open a folder via Windows explorer, alt+click on the embellies I want and drag&drop into Photoshop. Is there advantage to scripting them in that I am missing? Have a great weekend~

Unknown said...

It's faster for me to use the script. They stack without me having to approve each layer.

Laura said...

Hi Krystal! I do the same, but with a different process, but not different by much. I use Bridge to do it. I open both Bridge and Photoshop. I then go to Bridge and browse to my kit folder and I select them all. Then at the top I go to TOOLS>PHOTOSHOP>LOAD FILES INTO PHOTOSHOP LAYERS and then over in photoshop you will see it loading them all into one file, as layers. If I need them reversed order once its all loaded, then I make sure all layers are selected in Photoshop and I go to the top and click LAYERS>ARRANGE>Reverse. I dont know that one way is faster than the other, but it's always nice to know other ways to do things :-) Thanks for designing your beautiful kits!

eeoj said...

Just learned something new- Thank you!

Unknown said...

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Anonymous said...

Wish my old version of Photoshop had this option! bthiels

TJ said...

I don't have Photoshop, so I do this in Gimp, then save as a psd file to open in PSE.