APE Helpers- Keeping You From Going Bannanas From Photoshop Elements

Making a Rice Paper Effect

Overview: The typical medium for brush painting is rice paper. We can use A.P.E. to generate a texture that is quite similar to rice paper -- giving our painting added detail and realism.

1. Open the file you saved at the end of the last tutorial. If you did not save the file, click here and save the file to your "My Documents" folder. Now, open Bamboo_2.psd in A.P.E.

2. Select the "Foreground Bamboo" layer by clicking on it in the Layers palette.

3. Press CTRL+E to merge the "Foreground Bamboo" layer with the "Background" layer. The "Foreground Bamboo" layer will become the "Background" layer, and we will no longer be able to separate them. It's important to do this because filters only affect a single selection or layer, and we want the entire painting to be affected.

4. Click Filter -> Texturize -> Texturizer… a dialog box will pop up.

5. You should see six boxes and the one labeled Texturizer should be highlighted. Look at the options on the right – these let you choose how to make your texture look. Set the Texture to Canvas, Scaling to 55%, Relief to 7, and Light to Top Left, and then click OK.

This is the result:

6. Save the file as Bamboo2.psd to your "My Documents" folder. We will use this file in the next tutorial.

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