Brush is painting white not black!

[charlotteinkennesaw]

:(
I have been doing this same technique all week and all of a sudden my brush is painting white in the blank layer between my background photo and the one with the Gausian Blur.
First I Ctl J to make a copy>then press and hold the Ctrl key and click on the Create a New Layer icon>this is a blank layer beneath the blurry layer>then click on the top blurry layer and press Ctl G to group the blurry layer with the blank layer. So then is when I have trouble: I press D to make the foreground color black and then B to bring up a brush. Clicking on the blank layer I begin to paint the picture to reveal the blurry part. But either nothing happens or I see on the blank layer that white is being painted instead of black:eek: I have gone back over and over to see if I can find what is happening but I can't figure it out.:confused:

PS Does anyone besides me dream of Elements? In the wee hours of the morning I wake up and try to come up with solutions to my photo problems.:p

[Byron Gale]

Charlotte,

It does not matter what color you paint with when you are using a grouped layer as a clipping mask... only the presence and transparency of pixels matters.

...but I have no idea why you would get white as a foreground color when you tap D to restore to default colors!

Byron

[charlotteinkennesaw]

Byron, Eventhough it is white, it is still not revealing the blurry layer.:(

[Byron Gale]

Charlotte,

I'm suspicious that something is awry with your layers... if you're still having trouble, maybe you could post a screen-capture of your layers palette to help diagnose.

Byron

[charlotteinkennesaw]

Byron how would I go about doing a "screen capture". Do you mean pixcentral?:confused:

[Nimblewill]

Charlotte - You need to use a adjustment layer under your blurry layer. Click on a adjustment layer (I use Levels). Move it under the blurry layer and group the two. Click on the adjustment layer and paint with black to reveal the layers below.
You should really get Grants Tools, masking a layer is just a click away!

Drew

[Byron Gale]

Byron how would I go about doing a "screen capture". Do you mean pixcentral?:confused:Charlotte,

When I wish to do a screen capture, I tap the Print Screen (or PrtScn) button on my keyboard. This copies my screen to my Windows clipboard. Then, in Elements, I create a new file from the Clipboard and there's my screen capture. Of course, I usually crop it down to just the details important to the current discussion.

If I hold ALT while tapping Print Screen, then only the active window is captured - making for a less-cluttered image.

Then, after using Save For Web to save the image to a folder, I upload to Pixentral and link back into the thread, as usual

Byron

http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/1mUMa7LcodC2pIPdbifHVkwGiOxtwq0_thumb.jpg (http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1mUMa7LcodC2pIPdbifHVkwGiOxtwq0)