Re-colouring digital stamps in Photoshop.

As I do a lot of my work digitally, and often change the colours when I use my digital stamps, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you one of the simple ways you can change the colour of the outline of your digital stamp in a painting application before you print it out. This gives you a multitude of colour options, not limited by the number of coloured ink pads you have in your craft cupboard. You can then print out the coloured outline stamp and still use your copics, pencils or watercolours for a hand finished look.

These instructions apply if you have Photoshop or Elements, but they should also work in a similar way in Paint Shop Pro or other painting applications. However some of the tools or menu options may vary slightly.

• Open your chosen digi stamp jpeg or png in Photoshop. These screenshots show a jpeg. If you want a transparent background to your stamp so that you can layer it over a coloured background or another element, chose the png file to edit. The transparent background on the png will be displayed in Photoshop as a grey and white chequered area.
• As the images are supplied in greyscale to keep file size low, change the colour mode of the image to rgb so that you can work in colour from this point. Select mode from the image drop down menu and then chose rgb. Figure. 1.

• Select the colour you would like to fill your stamp with from your colour swatches palette as the foreground colour. If the colour swatches are not shown, they can be selected from the “window” drop down menu on the right. Figure 2.

• Select the magic wand tool, and with the shift key held down, click on an area of black with the magic wand tool. Make sure the “Contiguous” check box, as shown in the screen shot below, top right, is NOT checked. This will allow you to select ALL the black areas of the stamp, even though they are not directly connected to each other, allowing you to fill all the black areas at once. The “Tolerance” setting defines how much variation in colour/tone the magic wand tool takes into account around the edge of your selection. A tolerance of between 1 and 20 should work fine for black and white stamp images. Figure 3.

• Chose edit — fill from the drop down menu and use the settings as shown for the fill: Use: foreground colour, Mode: normal, Opacity: 100%. Click on OK. Figure 4.

• Final coloured image. Figure 5

• Save your image and import it into the document you wish to print from, if you are arranging it on a sheet with others, or print out directly from Photoshop.

Here’s a card that I created using another one of the stamps from the “HEARTS & FLOURISHES” set which I coloured in brown:

I hope you find this tutorial useful. If so, or if you have any questions, please let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them for you. As it’s my first Photoshop tutorial, any comments will be appreciated or any suggestions for further Photoshop topics. Thanks.