Hope you enjoy today's fun tutorial on creating layouts using templates. We used papers from the Shabby Miss Jenn's Egg Huntin' kit and elements from the FlowerStand kit. The templates are available from Kissed Studio - specifically templates from this set. The fonts used were Century Gothic and Porcelain.

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If you are interested in more tutorials please visit my site. Have a nice weekend!

TheLegacyLady

Inspired by April Anderton's Recent Article and amazing layout in the April/May 2008 issue of Digital Scrapbooking Magazine, I decided to see what I could do to get a similar look. April's article talks about pushing the limits of digital by printing your digital layouts on favorite traditional textured and pattern papers (you know the ones you see in the store and then think to yourself, "I wish this was digital!"?) Using the technique in the article, you can create something that can't be done traditionally - it is hybrid scrapbooking at its finest...

When I saw Shabby Miss Jenn's new kit, Weeds n Daisies, I knew I wanted to try something similar - and I wanted to see if it could be done 100% digitally... While pretty much anything is possible digitally, some of us have to experiment our way to the final results - many of these "results" could be classified as "Happy Photoshop Accidents," and you will probably learn much more about Photoshop playing around with things until you have your own "Happy Accident." Today I am going to share my process...

I started with the paper and flowers - very basic I know - but every layout needs to start somewhere!

Now with the photo I wanted to use added on top...

I can hear you saying, "Ok, now she is going to adjust the opacity..." and you would be right - I am going to adjust the opacity to 57%...which produces this...

Not exactly what I was going for... So I am going to duplicate the layer (at this point you will have two photo layers - turn the copy off by clicking the eye next the layer on the layers palette)

Now I will up the opacity of the first layer to 66% and add a layer mask (click the item with the red circle)...Next grab your brush tool and select BLACK as your foreground color. Making sure the photo layer is selected, begin painting directly on the photo to remove the excess background...(If you make a mistake, select white as your color and paint over your mistake - the original layer magically reappears!) You will end up with something like this... I love how the paper is coming through...

It still lacks something though... So I make the second photo layer visible, change the opacity to 25%, and change the blending mode to Linear Light...

The results boost the contrast and take away the washed out look of her face... Create frame, embellish, and you get this...

A fun look. Keep in mind there are so many different ways to do things like this in Photoshop - play with your blending modes and layer opacity to achieve the look that fits your style.

TheLegacyLady

Learn how to recolor your digital scrapbooking papers, elements and items in a few quick steps.

**One note - when clipping the hue/sat layer in Photoshop Elements - use CTRL-G instead of ALT-CTRL-G.

Enjoy!

TheLegacyLady

Have you noticed the darling new albums at SMJ Designs? These are so cute - they make it so easy to quickly put together darling pages...

I decided to put together a quick page tutorial for you all - it is very informal and is two parts - but hopefully it will be helpful for the newcomers to digital who want a fun way to get cute pages quickly - hope you all enjoy!

Part One

Part Two

TheLegacyLady