Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)

Tucked Photo Frames Made Easy

Anyone who has spent any time touring the GingerScraps Gallery knows that we have some inordinately talented and creative scrappers in our midst. And some equally superlative Designers. If you’re ever needing a healthy dose of inspiration, you won’t have to look far. Karen found a layout using one of these fabulous tucked frames in the Gallery and had to try it for herself. Turns out Sheri (Jumpstart Designs) has already done ALL the work and all we have to do is customize. Here’s a link to the product in her Shop.

So how easy is it to use these gems? I’ll show you! While I’m at it I’m going to add my tucked photo to a template from this month’s Spotlight Designer, Connie Prince. (Alas, it’s discontinued, but this will work regardless.) As you can see in the screenshot below, I’m using a layered file, in this case a PSD.

The only difference with using PNG files for this is that you’ll have to add them to the template’s photo spot manually, one at a time, aligning them as needed. I dropped this photo of my grandson Aaron onto the Photo Mat layer of the PSD.

When I Resized my photo, I found it still wasn’t a great fit; there were important details I didn’t want to crop out.

But… I CAN Resize the rest of the layers to fit to the photo. I Activated all those layers EXCEPT the photo and made my adjustments. The nice thing about the Photo Mat layer being black is that it’s easy to see if the Resized frame still isn’t right.

Did you notice the tab is partially covered by the photo – which isn’t the look I want? To solve that problem I just Clipped the photo to the Photo Mat layer. There are always multiple ways of doing these types of things in Elements, and I usually will show you two of them. Right-click>Create Clipping Mat is one way. The keyboard shortcut for Elements 14 and earlier versions is CTRL/CMD>G. For Elements 15 and more recent it’s CTRL/CMD>ALT/OPT>G.

Simply by Clipping the photo to the Mat, the tab now looks like it’s part of the paper the photo/frame combo is tucked into!

Now to move it all to the template. I just moved the whole stack as one object onto the photo spot on my template. Will it still work like a PSD though? One way to find out!

Brilliant! All I did was turn visibility for the template’s photo spot off and the tab looks like it’s the same paper that’s under the photo.

As you can see on the finished layout, Clipping a paper to the template did exactly what I wanted it to do, and my photo is neatly tucked under some brown cardstock.