Copyright ©2004 Kaleidoscope Collections, LLC. All rights reserved. www.KalCollections.com 1

Kaleidoscope KreatorTM Tutorial Series

Adding a Photo in the Center (Photoshop Elements) Some kaleidoscopes end up with a hole in the center or an uninteresting pattern. Adding a photo to the center of the kaleidoscope not only fixes the problem, but adds additional interest. Adding a photo is best done after adding a border (see Adding a Border to a Kaleidoscope). When adding a photo in the center of a kaleidoscope, you can either use the same photo that you used to create the kaleidoscope or a different one. For this tutorial, we’ll continue with the kaleidoscope we used in the Creating a Hole and Adding a Border tutorials and add a different photo in the center:

Kaleidoscope that has already had the background color changed, center hole enlarged and borders added.

Photo to be placed in the center hole of the kaleidoscope.

1. Open the file that contains your kaleidoscope using either the File>Open menu command or the

File Browser. (If you have already changed the background color, enlarged the center hole and/or added a border, your kaleidoscope may already be open.)

Copyright ©2004 Kaleidoscope Collections, LLC. All rights reserved. www.KalCollections.com 2

2. Open the photo that you want to fill the center of the kaleidoscope with. You should now have both images (the kaleidoscope and the center photo) open and the center photo should be “active”, i.e. the window title bar is blue instead of gray and the photo is “on top”. (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1

3. With the center photo will active, press

Ctrl-A on your keyboard to Select All. You should now see marching ants around the outer edge of the photo. (Fig. 2)

Then Ctrl-C to place the image in the copy buffer. (You won’t see anything happen at this point. You just have to trust that it’s there!)

Fig. 2

Copyright ©2004 Kaleidoscope Collections, LLC. All rights reserved. www.KalCollections.com 3

4. Click in the title bar of the kaleidoscope

image. The kaleidoscope window should now be on top and the title bar should be blue. (Fig. 3)

Fig. 3

5. Select the Magic Wand Tool from the Toolbox (Fig. 4a) and set the parameters in the Options bar

(Fig. 4b) to the following values:

Tolerance = 5 Anti-aliased is checked Contiguous is checked

Fig. 4a

Fig. 4b

Copyright ©2004 Kaleidoscope Collections, LLC. All rights reserved. www.KalCollections.com 4

6. Click in the center hole of the kaleidoscope.

This will select it and you will see marching ants around the outer edge of it. (Fig. 5)

Fig. 5

7. Now comes the fun part! Use the Edit>Paste

Into menu command to “paste” the photo into the center of the kaleidoscope. (Fig. 6)

Don’t worry if the picture is not lined up or is too big/small! We’re about to fix that! Notice that there is a rectangle of marching ants. This is showing you the border of the photo and as long as they are visible, you can edit the size and position of the photo to your heart’s content. As you can see, there is some work to do with this one!

Fig. 6

Copyright ©2004 Kaleidoscope Collections, LLC. All rights reserved. www.KalCollections.com 5

8. If the photo is the right size and all you need to do is

position it, select the Move Tool and then click and drag anywhere in the kaleidoscope image and the photo will move inside the center hole without affecting the rest of the kaleidoscope! (Fig. 7)

Fig. 7

9. If you want to resize the photo, you’ll need to use the Image>Transform>Free Transform menu

command. After selecting this command, you will be in Free Transform mode, as indicated by the “handles” (i.e. little squares) that you see at the corners and middle of each side of the marching ants marquee (Fig. 8a).

If you don’t see handles on all four corners, then your photo is probably outside of the image bounds. Simply hit Ctrl-0 (that’s Ctrl-[zero] ) while you are still in the Free Transform mode and the kaleidoscope image will resize automatically so that you can see all of the transform bounds (Fig. 8b).

Fig. 8a – The red arrows are pointing out the “handles”.

Fig. 8b – The red arrows are pointing out the corner handles.

Copyright ©2004 Kaleidoscope Collections, LLC. All rights reserved. www.KalCollections.com 6

The handles are what allow you to resize the image. You simply click and drag on them to resize. But before you do, it is important that you understand the concept of aspect ratios. When resizing photos, you want to be careful to keep the aspect ratio the same, i.e. you want to keep the ratio of the width to the height the same. If you don’t, then the image in the photo appears distorted. For example, in the photo above, if I were to only change the height of the photo (by click/dragging on the handle in the middle of the top or bottom edge), the photo would look a bit “squashed” (Fig. 9a & 9b).

Fig.9a – The original photo.

Fig. 9b – The photo after resizing just the height of the photo.

The Free Transform command will let you resize and distort your photo just about any which way you can imagine. So in order to keep your photos safe from being distorted, we recommend that you follow two guidelines:

1. Click on the “Maintain aspect ratio” button in the Options tool bar. It’s the one that looks like a chain link (Fig. 10):

Fig. 10 – The left arrow is pointing to the “Maintain aspect ratio” button. The right arrow is pointing to the “Commit Transform” checkmark button.

2. Click only on the corner handles to resize the photo. If you click on the handles in the middle of the sides, you will distort the aspect ratio regardless of whether you have clicked on the “Maintain aspect ratio” button.

Now you are ready to resize your photo! You can click and drag on the corner handles as many times as you wish to get your photo to the size you want it. If you need to move your photo, move the mouse pointer inside of the bounding box and then click/drag the photo to a different position. You can even rotate the photo by moving the mouse pointer outside of the bounding box and clicking dragging.

Copyright ©2004 Kaleidoscope Collections, LLC. All rights reserved. www.KalCollections.com 7

Once you have the photo positioned where you want it, click on the “Checkmark” at the right of the Options bar (Fig. 10) to finalize the transformation.

10. At this point, all you need to do to complete this tutorial is hit Ctrl-D on your keyboard to deselect the photo (i.e., get rid of the marching ants). Be aware that when you do this, you will no longer be able to edit just the photo in the center of the kaleidoscope. So be sure that you like the positioning of the photo before you deselect. If for some reason you want to further modify the photo (be it a Free Transform or something else), do it before you deselect the photo.

The final kaleidoscope.