Greatest Hits: Templates with a Twist

In addition to my Olympics hangover, I haven’t slept properly in nearly a week, so my head is pretty fuzzy. Since we were recently talking about how to add photo spots to templates, I thought maybe I’d replay this one:

Did you know that you can combine two (or more) templates into a single layout? Are you shocked? Remember, templates are amazingly versatile tools. You don’t have to slavishly follow the design for them to help you create fabulous layouts. They’re intended as inspirational guides, with symbols as placeholders. With templates, your creativity is only limited by your imagination. I’m going to show you how to do a template mashup right here, right now. Let me begin by saying I probably wouldn’t have chosen this bundle for this technique, but the opportunity presented itself and I ran with it. To have the best results with your template mashup, you should choose two templates with clusters, photo spots, masks or combinations of those that you really like, with a good amount of white space, so you’ll have lots of options.

I used a JB Studios template shown below as my base template. I like the row of circles with the small cluster, and I really like the little word strip cluster in the corner. I made a mental note of what the file was named so I could find it later…

Then I chose this Tinci Designs template (SO sad to see her retire!) for my second one. I had 2 photos I wanted to use. Now, I could have resized the centre cluster, which would have actually worked beautifully, but I wanted my photos to be really visible.

I had to make room for the section of Tinci’s template that I was going to move onto the JBS template so I selected all the layers but the background and the little wordstrip cluster then moved them up almost to the top of the canvas.

See how that gave me a lot of room?

The next step is to go to my second template and select all the layers I want to add to the first one. If you don’t have the Bounding Box turned on, you might want to do that. It will help you move only the layers you want by including the shapes you’ve selected inside it. You can see my Bounding Box in the screenshot below.

Once you’ve selected only the layers you want to copy onto your other template, right click on the Layers panel to open the Layers menu. Then click on Duplicate Layers…

A new menu opens with everything you have in your Photo Bin included. Look down the list until you find your first template. If you can’t remember the file name, look for the .psd suffix. When you’ve found it, click on it.

Your dialog box will look like this. You can rename the group of layers if you want, but you don’t have to. When you’ve got the correct file selected, click OK.

PSE automatically centres everything on the canvas, so this is what the new mashed-up template looked like right after I added the Tinci pieces to the JBS base template. Time to fine-tune!

I moved all the Tinci pieces down so the JBS pieces peeked out above them.  Then I had to figure out what to do with that little word strip cluster that HAD to be in there.

Once I was happy with how it all looked, I could get my layout rolling. There were some layers from the original template that were completely concealed, so when I came to them in the Layers panel, I just deleted them. (I always work with copies of everything, never the original. That way I don’t have to worry about losing something I might want again later!)

If you decide to try this out, remember that you don’t HAVE to copy everything from one template onto the other. Choose the parts you LOVE. Forget about the rest. I could have copied just one of the photo clusters. I could have only copied the word strip cluster. It’s all about what you like most! Have fun!

Templates Everywhere… But Not the One You Need

We’ve all been there. You have a selection of photos and a coordinating kit you really want to scrap, not a ton of time, and really want to use a template to speed things up. So you run a search for a suitable template, only to come up with… none that will work right out of the folder. Maybe you have too many photos for the spots on the template, an issue GingerScrapper Joleen ran into recently. Or you have too many spots on the template for the number of photos you want to use. Well, the too-many-spots-for-photos is an easy fix. Just delete the extra(s)! But wait! The too-many-photos-for-spots isn’t a difficult fix either! Let me show you four ways to do it without straining your brain.

Of course, the easiest way of solving this problem is to simply Copy a photo spot already on the template that will work with your extra photo, then find a likely place to put it. So I’m not going to show you that.

Now, I have literally hundreds of templates from several Designers. I’ve talked about how I organize my templates a few times before so we’re not going over that again. (You’re welcome!) For this exercise I purposely searched for templates that only had three photo spots. Then I reviewed them all, looking for those I wouldn’t have to make a gazillion adjustments to in order to make them work with the four photos I have pictured below.

I selected four templates and will show you how I’ve tinkered with them to accommodate all four photos. First is this one from Dear Friends Designs. The spots are in portrait orientation but that’s an easy fix.

Don’t forget that templates are tools. They’re blueprints, but unlike blueprints, they don’t require absolute slavish devotion to any part of them. There are no rules about adding, subtracting, moving, turning, flipping or substituting any part of them. You can even merge two templates into one layout! Every single element of a template is a SUGGESTION. Okay… three of my photos are in landscape orientation so it only makes sense to Image>Rotate>90° Right the whole template.

But. It’s still not really working for me. So this time I Image>Rotate>Flip Horizontal the whole template and it’ll work a lot better.

Can you see what I did to create a fourth photo spot? Yes! I used the journal block! Dear Friends Designs‘ templates come pre-shadowed, and the white border is a Stroke contained in the Layer Style. It was a simple matter to select any one of the actual photo spots then right-click>Copy Layer Style then go to the “new” photo spot, right-click>Paste Layer Style to add a white border and matching drop shadow. To complete a layout with this template, a few items will need rearranging. You can see that I’ve moved the journaling-block-photo-spot down and tucked it into the cluster at the bottom right, plus I Rotated and repositioned the banner. The rest will come together.

This grid-style template is from Magical Scraps Galore. It’s simple, the photo spots are more or less right for my purposes and there’s an easy way to add a fourth photo. Let’s review.

This was probably the easiest conversion I did. I replaced the title block at the bottom with one of my photos, moved the title up to the journaling block and resized the middle left elements. Easy peasy!

This template is from Tinci Designs. Might we take a moment to mourn the loss of such a prolific and generous talent? Retirement comes eventually for all of us, and we’re really going to miss her. Back to the task at hand. Here, I’ll need to do some photo spot resizing and a little tweaking, but it’ll definitely work.

But first it needed Image>Rotate>90° Right, then Image>Rotate>Flip Horizontal.

Again, I used the journal block as a photo space, which may or may not need a white border and drop shadow. The title can cover up that nasty fake snow in the top photo. The photo spots were all resized in one dimension or both, to suit the photos better. But doing so didn’t mess up the overall look. Tinci‘s templates are really easy to customize.

My fourth option is this template from Connie Prince. At first glance, it doesn’t look like it’ll work all that well. But I know that Connie‘s templates use a paper layer for the white border on her photo spots, and that’ll work perfectly for what I have in mind. I’m going to put my two longest landscape photos into that big photo spot!

And I can use that paper circle to hide a multitude of sins… Once I fit the photos into the spot edge-to-edge – I DID NOT Clip the photos to the spot – I created a gap between the bottom of one and the top of the other. I made sure the gray photo spot layer was the active layer. Then I used the Marquee Tool to outline that gap.

Then I Edit>Cut [CTRL/CMD>X] the gray bit out of that gap. The white paper creating the border around the spot remains untouched.

In this screenshot you can easily see the white strip! Another feature of Connie‘s templates is that she doesn’t pre-shadow, so I can decide how I want those two photos to look in the finished layout. I just moved some of the layers at the bottom up a bit to help hide the ugly fake snow bit. The smaller photo spots needed minor adjustments too, the left one tilted into landscape orientation and the right one downsized into a more square shape.

I know some of you will have other methods of increasing your photo ops with templates. Please share them in the comments. I read them all, even if I don’t reply to them. I’d like to thank Sherry for her recommendation for PeaZip when I bemoaned the number of folders I had to unzip. I tried it out and it’s great! Just like this little community we’ve created here…