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ARTICLE - Colouring digital stamps in Photoshop.

Since I do a lot of work digitally  and want to be able to change my colours frequently when using Digital Stamps one of the simplest ways to change color is in a painting application before the image is actually printed out.  This will afford you many colour options without the expense of coloured ink pads, markers water colors and pencils and still offers a hand finished look.

Since I use PhotoShop these instruction will apply to that program but should work in a similar way with Paint Shop Pro and other painting applications out there with only slight menu option changes.

First open your chosen Digital Stamp .jpeg in Photoshop or whatever program you are using.  If you wish to have a transparent background to your stamp so you can put it over a coloured background them the .png file format is what you will want to use shown in PhotShop as a checkered grey and white area.

Since most images come in a Black & white (or greyscale) file you will need to go to the  Image tab, clicking on Mode in the drop down box and then clicking the RGB Color tab in the second drop down box.

Next select the colour you want to fill the area with from the colour palette or use the eyedropper tool to select the colour.  If the colour swatches are not visible go to the Window tab at the top and click on the Colour tab from the drop down box.

Now select the magic wand tool, and holding the shift key held down, click on an the area you wish to colour with the magic wand tool making sure the “Contiguous” check box at the top of your screen is checked.  This will  make sure that you check only the area you want to colour.  If you wish to colour the whole image then make sure the “Contiguous” box is NOT checked.   The “Tolerance” setting defines how much variation in colour/tone the magic wand tool takes into account when selecting the area.  A tolerance of between 1 and 20 should be sufficient for your images.

Choose your Paint Bucket tool on the left hand side of your screen – at the top of your screen you will see several options:  Use – Fill – Foreground:  Mode: normal:  Opacity: 100%: Tolerance: 100%: then click on your image with the Paint Bucket and it will fill the areas selected with your new colour.

Now you can save your image and import it into the document you wish to print or you can print it directly from PhotoShop.