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Changing the color of your background mat and photos

Today, I’m going to go over our free template, which was a mat template, and if you want the free mat template then just go to email sign up and click sign up. And then you will be redirected to a link and you’ll open a second time and then you’ll be directed to our free templates and you’ll get this mat template along with several other free template. But today, I’m going to talk about how to use this mat template.

First, I want to move this out of the way. Now this is the mat template that we’re going to work on today and right now, it has the pictures placed. I’ve had a couple of people mentioned that sometimes when I just start by having things already done that it's a little bit overwhelming because they want to know every detail. I do go over in my earlier tutorials how to bring a picture into a photoshop template, adjust the layers and move them up and down. So I tried to move things along quickly so that I can learn these things quickly, so if you need to know how to drag a picture in, work with the layers, I suggest you go to my website and you click on free tutorials. And then you arrow down to the bottom here and click on adding a picture to a magazine template and this will actually show you how to add a picture to any template. And then if you want to know more about changing fonts and colors on templates, then I suggest you watch this second tutorial here. Alright, let’s get this out of the way and lets start moving you along.

So, I’ve already got my pictures placed in here and my pictures are right here, in this layer and if I arrow—click on this to arrow it down and I arrow down, you can see these are my three pictures. Okay, so what I’ve done on this template is I’ve added some adjustment layers and I’m going to arrow that down and I just added some adjustment t layers that you can play around with to make changes to your pictures. And as long as these adjustments are above these picture layers, they’re going to have effects on these pictures. So if I turn them off, you’ll see that my picture has change back to color and if I turn them on, you’ll see that they change to black and white with a little bit of a yellow. So basically, you can just double click on these and you can just play with them and watch how they make your photos change.

And there’s all kinds of adjustments you can do, changing the curves here. So that’s something that’s kind of fun to play with and then the levels and you move this back and forth and the black and white and then you can also add yellow, you can just change—it removes colors even though you cant see the colors off and now you know how that works.

Okay, so I’ve added a hue and saturation to the textured and the smooth mats, I’m just going to work with the texture of one right now. So basically, you just double click on this and as you watch, you can change the color of the mat as you just slide the hue back and forth and that’s a little bit muted which is sometimes looks nice for mats. But if you wanted it to be brighter then you could just increase the saturation and then again, move the hue and you can see it changing the colors and then you can even make it darker. So it's kind of fun to play with

When layers have hue saturation and adjustments, then you can just easily make changes, match some colors in the picture. I’m going to go ahead and cancel this. And I also just want to show you how you can add this to any layer. So let’s say you have a frame and you want to add a hue saturation layer so that you can change the color and I’m just going to go ahead and throw this away.

Okay so, the easiest way to add a hue saturation adjustment layer is to click this little tool right here come up to hue saturation and then click okay, come to the layer, right click it and click create clipping mask. Then you can double click your hue saturation layer and then you can just start sliding it and making the changes that you want. And that’s how easy it is to make adjustments to your mat color and your photos. So I hope that you enjoyed the free template.