A Merry Christmas to Everyone

[Horus]

I would just like to take this opportunity of wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year, health and happiness to everyone whatever your nationality, colour or religion and I hope that we will all be chatting together this time next year, also a big thanks to Keefy for hosting this site that we all share and enjoy.



Just out of interest I thought you may like a Winter scene featuring my favourite woodland walk and for you all fans of editing software the card was produced using Gimp and my own images.

[LovelyLadyLux]

MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY and PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR TO YOU and to EVERYBODY at E4U


Lovely card H! Thanks for sharing your walk (fair amount of snow you have there too)

[Kiya]

Horus lovely card & robin, it looks a right fatty!.......thank you and

A Merry Christmas to you & Mrs H....and everyone on E4U

[Grandad]

I would like to add my very best wishes to everyone on this, the friendliest of forums, for a
VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND GOOD HEALTH AND PROSPERITY IN 2013.

[Winged Isis]

Seasons greetings to all from Downunder! May 2013 bring joy, peace and prosperity.

Lovely card, H! Was the robin really there, or is that some of your mega-clever smoke and mirrors computer tricks?

[Horus]

No it was all smoke & mirrors WI, but they are all taken from my own photographs.

[Winged Isis]

Clever trousers!

[Ruby Slippers]

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all, from me too!

[Kiya]

Just trying

[Horus]

Nicely done Kiya, use of masks for the frame, cutting and pasting from other images with good edges and feathering. A good touch to make Sants's boots look as if they are in the snow, good scale on the Robin and a good variety of coloured letters, so well done : I call that an excellent result using a lot of what you have learned.

[Kiya]

Hey Ho Horus you don't miss a trick eh ..............wait a minute you did, have a look again, something you gave in a tutorial just recently

[LovelyLadyLux]

Good one Kiya!! Nice........!!!

[Horus]

Probably a bit of colour popping on the house or maybe a new sky with all that snow in the foreground it may have wiped it out, but whatever I have missed you made a good job of it

[Kiya]

Horus not colour popping but I remembered the " straight line tutorial " so used that for putting in some red & green along the roof & eaves of the house , just to add a bit more colour

Now I want to know how you & Grandad did your fancy text in your above photos I like Grandad's red text with the white snow tops, that is Xmassy looking

[Horus]

Well done for remembering to use that option.
As for the text, I am sure that Grandad will be along to explain what he did, but I suspect that he has used a particular font from somewhere else other than Gimp to create it as each letter has the same attributes to it, although of course I could be wrong and he has carefully done each letter by hand so to speak.

My own letters were created by using a standard text from Gimp then applying all sorts of fancy effects to get those results, a bit long winded to describe here, but it would make a good tutorial. Basically it involves some 'Blurring' 'Copying & Pasting' to new layers, adding a 'Bump Map', adding a 'Gradient' and them making specific adjustments using 'Curves' to finish it off. So as you can see it is quite involved, but not overly difficult once you follow the various steps.

[Kiya]

Oh I'd be sure to get in a flutter with what you say Horus & best wait to get a tutorial from you sometime

I shall wait to see what Grandad tells us

[Horus]

We can do that in the New Year, so you will need to remind me.

[Grandad]

Kiya I wanted a font with snow on the characters and Googled 'free snow fonts' or something like that. I found this one 'Ice and snow' on the link http://www.fontspace.com/aarrgghh/ice-and-snow

If you download it you will need to unzip it because it downloads as a zipped file. There are many more free fonts online but I expect like most of us you already have dozens of them.

With this font it is easy to change the colour of words or even letters. You only get the snow effect on upper case characters.

I shall also look forward to some guidance from Horus on the more impressive colour modifications with text.

[Kiya]

Thanks Grandad for the link, I'm not sure what, which, where to download so will leave it till Roy is home tonight

I've never downloaded fonts before, didn't even think it existed

Will look forward to some new tutorials from Horus in the new Year

[Grandad]

Kiya, there are hundreds of fonts available for free download if you just search for 'free fonts'.

If you click 'download' for a particular font it should appear at your bottom (task) bar. Double click that and you will be asked if you want to save it. Click OK and it will ask where? I usually save on desktop because it is easy to find.

I then copy it from the desktop, open my control panel, and paste it into 'fonts'. I got a window telling me that it was zipped with the option to unzip. OK that, and it is added to your stock fonts available for use in any program.

I just did another greeting card. I used the Santa image again because I had spent quite a lot of time selecting it (and the original picture is my desktop wallpaper to be a bit seasonal ) The 'moon' is actually the sun from a Luxor sunset very much tweaked to change its appearance.