Archives for December 2016

Getting More Mileage from Your Templates… Easily!

I know this is a ridiculously hectic time of year for everybody. And I also know that in a few short weeks all of us will have a plethora of new photos to scrap. So this quick little tut will show you how to make a template do double duty. Templates already help to streamline the process, and any time they can be modified to accomplish more than one purpose, it’s a bonus.

I had some very sweet photos of my daughter and youngest grandson that I was dying to make into a 2-page spread for the December Buffet challenge; I wanted the layouts to look similar but not identical, and I didn’t have a lot of time. So I found a template that would work really nicely for my photos in the lovely A Year in Review – December set from Krizstina of Tinci Designs, shown below. I’d already decided that Winter Whimsies from the amazing Katie  – Just So Scrappy – would be perfect with my photos.

I knew I wanted to have the backgrounds identical to each other, in terms of papers used. So I turned off all the layers but the main paper blocks. A quick way to do that is to run your cursor over the eyeballs and up the column in the Layers panel while holding down the left mouse button. That’ll turn off every layer you run the mouse over.

If you look where the arrows are pointing you can see the eyeballs have been closed. I clipped my papers to each of the template’s main paper layers and this is what it looked like. Kinda blah, I know, but it gets better!

I’ve mentioned before that the symbols used by designers of templates aren’t RULES. They’re suggestions. You can substitute any manner of things for the flowers (for example), you can move them around if you find they’re covering up your photos in the wrong places, you can duplicate them or delete them and play with the any way you want. In a lesson down the road I’ll show you how to combine two templates into one smashingly unique layout. But back to the lesson at hand. I’ve turned on all the layers that were invisible before. This is an important step, because I want to know where all the place holders are later, when I use the copy of this layout I’m going to make in a second.

I took the steps shown below (oh, you know that’s a lie, I used keyboard shortcuts), and I saved the PSD file with the papers added in. I renamed the file so it wouldn’t overwrite the original template. I might want to use it again some day. For those of you dying to learn keyboard shortcuts, they’re actually right there in plain sight. CTRL/CMD>Shift>S is the quick way of getting to the Save As menu.

I’m going to share a little workflow tip with you now. I always make a folder for each of my layouts. Then I COPY the items I want to use into the folder so they’re all together and I can see how they’re going to look. When I’m ready to work on the layout, I open the folder and select all the items in it into PSE. Then when I’m all finished, I save the final layout in that folder both as a PSD file and a JPEG. When I’m positive I won’t need to make any changes (spelling, layers I forgot to shadow, weird little not-quite-right things I notice when I post to the gallery, you know what I mean) I can delete the rest of the things in the folder (BECAUSE THEY’RE COPIES) to save memory. That’s what I’ve shown you below.

In this step, I selected the folder I was saving to (1.) then renamed the file so I’d know which one was which (2.) and made sure it was still in PSD format so it could be changed later (3.)

Here’s my first finished layout. (The gray border is the background of my workspace in PSE, not part of the layout.)

After I saved that layout as I explained above – with the layout name instead of the working file name! – I opened up the working template again. As I said, I wanted it to match the first one, but look different. I followed the steps shown below to flip the whole template horizontally so the paper strips would line up perfectly.

Then I went ahead and moved some things around a bit, eliminated one of the photos, used a tag instead of another of the photos, enlarged the one that was left, changed some of the elements I used and ended up with this!

Here are the two layouts side-by-side, just the way they’ll be in Aaron’s birthday album of his first year in pictures.

There you go… short, sweet and to the point. Have a great week… I’ll be thinking up something new to share with you next week.

For all you former paper scrappers: INKED EDGES!

After last week, I hope there are still people willing to read my tuts. I know it was a bit of a beast, but I’m sure somebody out there is happy to give it a whirl.

Recently I was making some greeting cards and reverted to my paper-scrapping days. I LOVE inked edges on various parts of my cards and I did them on many of my paper layouts too. While I was getting dirty it occurred to me there might be a digiscrapping tutorial in there somewhere. I’ve done inked edges on some of my digi layouts and have an easy way to do them so now I’m going to share that with you. And as promised last week, this is a short snapper of a tut.

This handy tip will work on just about any paper item you can think of, with some slight variations. The trick is to work on a separate layer and on a larger-than-usual canvas. I used a template from Aprilisa’s Ready for the Weekend template pack #1 for this tutorial layout since a template makes things simple to demonstrate. So let’s get going.

I opened my template on my work space. Then I enlarged the canvas size it’s sitting on to 13×13 inches. This part is important, otherwise all you’ll have is a mess. I use a keyboard shortcut (I know, shocking, right?) for this – CTRL/CMD>Alt>C but you might like to do it the hard way. Click on the Image tab, Resize and Canvas Size. (See the keyboard shortcut there?)

This menu will pop up. Choose something larger than 12×12 inches.

Now you should have a nice transparent border all around your template.

The next step is to turn off the visibility for all the layers except the background layer, where we’re going to start. There’s a quick and easy way to do this too. Just hold down the left click button while you drag your cursor over the little eyeballs.

Of course, if you’re just inking the edges on a tag or a journal card, you can skip this step. Just make sure you have a good transparent border all around your item.

*****Before going any further, open a new blank layer just above the layer you’re working on. All you have to do is click on the icon that looks like a piece of paper with a folded corner, above the Layers panel. This is another VITAL step.*****

Next, select a brush that has a bit of scatter, but not too much. You can use a default brush that came with your software, or you can pick up some cool free ones online from places like Brusheezy.com. I like to use a spray paint brush. And we old-school paper scrappers typically use a brown ink to grunge up our stuff, so I’ve got a brown in the foreground of my Color Picker. Just below the Brush pop-up menu is the adjustment panel for your brushes. Adjust the size so your brush isn’t huge, but is big enough to make the job easy. I usually go with about 400 pixels. You see the default settings for this particular brush set in the screenshot.

Now all you have to do is paint around the edges. Have your brush cursor just off the edge of the paper and go all around the whole piece of paper. You can stop-and-go or do it all as a smooth dragging movement.

When you’ve got the whole edge inked you’re going to clip the brush layer to your paper. Right click on the brush layer in the Layers panel then choose Create Clipping Mask. Or you can do what I do, CTRL/CMD>G.

Magic! But there’s more!!

That inked edge is a tad bit dark, don’t you think? So let’s pull the opacity of that layer down to something more appealing. Like maybe about… oh… 29%. And now it’s a nice, grungy but understated inked edge.

The final step is to merge the layers. Select the background paper and brush layers, then right click and choose Merge Layers. Or… do like Jan does and go CTRL/CMD>E and you’re done.

I inked the edges of most of the papers I used for my layout for the November Buffet Challenge. I used parts of several kits: Aprilisa’s Pumpkin Everything Krafties, Connie Prince’s My Journey extra papers, Keley Designs’ Thankful for You stickers and Mandy King’s Family Tradition elements. And, of course, Aprilisa’s template.

I hope you’re enjoying your December and aren’t stressing too much about all the things you think you have to do. See you all next week!