Good morning!  Ramona here with another tutorial.  I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and are enjoying a happy New Year.  If you are like me, you have lots of scrapping goals ahead of you for the coming year! Kate shared some great ideas with us last week, so click HERE if you missed her tutorial last week.

Today I’m going to be giving a few tips for recoloring an element for your layout.  This week will be recoloring a simple element that is only one color to begin with.  In two weeks, I’ll expand it to include elements that have more than one color in it.

First thing, pull up the element you want to recolor and maybe another element that has the color you’re going for. Here you can see that I have a yellow curly ribbon (from Jady Day Studio’s birthday kit) and I want it to match the red cupcake.

Change the color of your foreground color to the red in the cupcake.  Then click Image>>Adjustments>>Hue/Saturation.  The easiest step from here is to click the colorization box in the bottom right hand corner.  It will make your ribbon look like this:

Notice that there are three sliders on the menu box.  The top slider controls the hue. If you have used the colorize box, you won’t really need to worry about this slider. It controls the colors. If you choose to not use the colorize box, then you can play with that top slider to get it to the red.

The Saturation slider deals with how much color is in the item. The farther to the left the slider is, the less color there will be. In fact, if you move it all the way to the left, it will take all the color out.  So, for our ribbon today, we want to move the slider to the right to increase the color.

The last slider deals with the brightness/darkness of your colors.  This one usually doesn’t want to be moved too far from the center, but I like to move it a little to the left to deepen the shadows.

Here is what our ribbon now looks like after moving those two sliders a little:

One last trick that I did here was once I got it close, I duplicated the layer and changed the top layer to soft light.  It made it quite bright, but really  made the colors pop.  Next, I moved the opacity level of the top layer down to about 20% and then merged the two together!

Now you have a red ribbon to continue on with your layout!

You all know how much I love my photoless layouts, and I really do!  But if I’m going to scrap with photos (and I really do, do plenty!) then I want the photo to look great!  I want it to pop off the page!  I think that the purpose of papers and elements in a kit is to do their best at pointing all eyes to my photo!!  Today, I’m going to talk about some tips to help do this!

I’m going to start with a photo that I would like to scrap. Here is a picture I recently scrapped of my son’s choir performance from last winter:

At first glance, there are lots of things wrong with this photo.  This is how it came, straight out of my camera.  The indoor lighting created a lot of colors that I don’t like!

The first thing I did was to sharpen the photo.  To do this, make three copies of your photo.  Your layer palette will look like this:

Do you see the drop down screen, right above the photos in the layer palette that says “normal”.  We are going to play with these.  Highlight the middle layer and change the drop down menu to screen.  Next, change the top layer to soft light.  Now, most of the time, your photo will look way overexposed.  So go back to the middle layer, highlight it and change the opacity slider to quite a bit less. I usually keep it in the 40′s or under, depending on the photo.

Now, my photo looks like this:

See how much sharper everything looks?  It just doesn’t seem to have the dirty glass look to it!

However, it is still looking way off with the colors!  We need to remove a bit of that yellow.  One way that I like to do this is to go to:

Image>>Adjustments>>Levels

You’ll get a menu like the one above.  See where it says “channel”?  Click on the drop down menu and start with red.  Move the slider on the left.  Next, choose the color green and move the middle slider and last choose blue and move the far right slider.

Play with these to add or take away colors to try and get the best look you can.

For me, I wanted even less color in the photo so it would go with the kit that I was scrapping, so I went back to Image>>Adjustment>>Hue/Saturation.  I slid the saturation slider almost all the way to the left.  This removed most of the color:

And here is my final product, in the layout:

Every photo will vary, but using these three techniques, either alone or together, you can achieve a variety of looks with your photos!

Good morning!  Ramona here to teach you another scrapping tip!  This one is so simple, but took me forever to figure out!  I don’t know about you, but I get tired of all my photos being in the shape of a square or rectangle.  Sometimes I want softer edges rather than the sharp points that come so automatic.  When I was a paper scrapper, I was way too in love with all the fancy scissors.  I mean seriously, someone should have taken those away from me! I have albums with pictures cut out in all different shapes and sizes with the craziest edgings.  But, as I progressed as a paper scrapper, I had a very nifty cutter that clipped the edges of my paper or photo on each corner to give a nice rounded look.  I loved using those!  And when I switched to digital, I missed having a tool like that–until I figured out this nifty set of steps!

First, we’re going to start with the photo we want to crop.  Here is the one I chose for this tutorial:

Isn’t she a cutie?  It’s Abby, my 10 year old!  Anyway, the next step is to open a blank 12×12 canvas.  Here are the settings I use, if you haven’t done one before:

Once my new blank screen is open, I’m going to create a shape using the shape tool. I click on it on the menu to the left and then I make a few adjustments up top:

Change your radius up top.  For a slight curve, I usually do between 20-40 pixels. If I want a more pronounced curve, I will go up to 70 or 80.  Experiment to find what you like!  For today’s, I set it at 40.  The color doesn’t matter because in essence, we are creating a template piece and the box will be covered with our photo!

I draw the shape, making it about the size I’m going to want it on my layout.  Here I made it pretty big, but you can certainly go smaller or even make smaller once you have your photo clipped to it.  Notice on the layer palette to the right that it says shape one.  You’ll want to rastersize the shape so you can clip something to it.  Right click on the square on the layer palette and choose the option “rastersize layer”.

Now we’re going to slide our photo over the shape and right click again on the photo in the layer palette and choose “Create Clipping Mask”.  As you can see, below, my photo was bigger than my shape, so I can adjust the photo by moving in the little corner boxes.  (IMPORTANT NOTE:  When changing the shape of any item, always hold down the shift key while you are moving the corners so that it evenly changes the height and the width.  Otherwise you can get a pretty skewed version of your photo!)

Get the look you want and then right click on the layer palette again and choose the option “merge layers”.

And there you have your rounded corner photo to use on your layout!  Easy Peasy!

Ramona here, with another tutorial and I’m super excited about this one!  You’ve already learned my passion of journaling, so the next best thing are titles! A title can make or break a layout!  When I first started scrapping, I had no idea how important a title could be.  I would slap a few photos on a paper, throw on a few elements-maybe add some journaling, but that was it.  I even have a few examples to show.  But first, you have to promise not to laugh, because these layouts were pretty bad!  I didn’t know the concept of shadows and my journaling was way too big, but it was a starting point!  Notice how lifeless these layouts seem without a title:

And here is another one:

Without a title, the layout is just some pictures and papers.  There is nothing to really sum up the story I’m telling.  I think that ever layout should have a theme-something that really brings the message home.   A title will catch the attention of those looking at your layout and make them want to keep reading.  It is the title that sort of says it all!  Don’t get me wrong, a really good picture can do a lot of the work, but in my every day storytelling of our life, I don’t have lots of dynamic photos that hold their own!  I use journaling and a good title to pull it altogether and make the photo what it is!

So, where do you start?  Do you add your Title at the beginning or the end?  I find that my layouts that flow the best are the ones where I plan the title out first.  The title starts the layout and everything builds from there.  I also like to use several different mediums for a title.  I love alpha’s and love using them.  But just using one alpha for the whole title can sometimes be boring.

First, plan what the title will be and if it is more than one word, pick the most important word of the Title.  Plan to do that word different, in a way that will stand out.  It might be the only word that uses the main alpha of the kit or it might be the only word that doesn’t.  For my example, I chose to do two words with the alpha and one word using a paper from the kit.  To start, I pulled up a blank 12×12 screen and started doing the word, one letter at a time.  I chose a font that was wide and simple.

I create each letter on its only layer.  This will give me the ability to move the letters around and do some creative things with the word.  In the beginning of  my scrapping days, I didn’t do this and I never liked the extra space between each letter that I would have leftover.  Also, a trick to do each layer quick and simple is to type one letter and then right click on the layer (layer palette to the right) and then click back on your main working screen and type another letter and repeat!

Once I had all my letters there and the sizes I wanted, I rasterized each letter and then clipped a paper to it, layer by layer.

Then I organized the letters together and added it to my layout with the words I had already created with the alpha.  One trick I like to do with my words is to link them together once I have them how I like them, so that I can move them around my page and not lose their form.  To do this, highlight all the layers of your word (on your layer palette) and right click on one of the letters and choose the option “link layers”.  This will put a little lock on each layer.  To undo this, just repeat and choose the option “unlink layers”.

Once I had it to this point, then I created the layout around the title.  This layout is a photoless layout and here is the end product:

Here are a few more examples of layouts with Titles:

With that layout, I was doing a play on the movie title, “Night at the Museum” and by using alpha’s, wordart and even just a word typed out.

This layout is by Lisa and I love her simple title.  Here is a great example of when a typed font can work great as a Title.  I think that because it is turned sideways and on a plain paper with amazing clustering next to it, it really shows up!  And the cute poem for the journaling matches up perfectly.

Love this one!  The title goes so well with the photo and really sums up the journaling.  I wanted to read her story because of the title!

I hope these examples help to bring a few new ideas to your titles!  I would love to see your work, so please link your layouts here and I’ll stop by and leave some love!

One of my favorite things about digital scrapping is clustering!  Back in the old days of paper scrapping, I would have lots of matting, under my photos, but other than a well-placed sticker or two, that was about it!  I think there are so many fun things to do in digital scrapping!  The thing about clusters is they really help to give depth to the layout and make it feel like it could just pop right off the page!  So, today I’m going to share with you how I cluster and build the depth of the layout.  I hope it helps and gives you some ideas in your own scrapping!

First, I pick my main background paper and the photos and place them on the paper. It helps to give me a feel for where I’m headed.  You can also see, from this first example, how plain it looks!

I absolutely LOVE these photos!  My two daughters and my amazing mother in law look so happy and beautiful together.  I love how natural and classic these photos are, so I wanted to put them in places and build clusters around them that would help to really make them shine!

So, I always start with paper pieces!  I love circles and squares and rectangles!  They are a great way to coordinate the papers of the kit I’m using, as well as give some background to the whole layout!

See how simple it is to create the shapes and clip some different papers to them?  Here are a few rounded squares to throw in!

Since I split the photos, having one on one side and the other two on the opposite side, I thought a nice long rectangle strip would help to sort of connect them all.

Then I like to look through the elements and see if there are any fun mats or swirls.  Swirls are great to give length to a cluster-they sort of draw out the clusters.

I love working with leaves!  If a kit is missing leaves, I’m always sad!  I know that sounds silly, but I just love to use greenery for clustering!  Also notice that I used one of the frames included in the kit.  I used one to frame the small picture and then used the other as sort of another mat.

I added another frame, a hanging one and love the dimension this frame adds to the whole layout!  It almost gives the look that that cluster is floating!  I have also started adding flowers.  Notice that I put some flowers under the pictures and mats and frames and put others on top.  By doing both, it adds the feeling of depth!

I added buttons, some word strips and the stitched “Love” as my title.

And here is my final layout:

I hope these tips helped and I can’t wait to see any layouts you do, trying these tips!  The most important thing to remember is that every element does not have to be fully seen!  Don’t be afraid to tuck and tuck and tuck-just leaving little corners or little pieces!  The more layers the better and the more different types of texture will give your layout a lot of pop and movement!  Also notice that even though I used quite a few papers and lots of the elements, there is still a lot of white space remaining.  White space is the term used in art to describe the space of a layout that has nothing on it except the paper.  It serves the purpose of letting your eyes focus on the clusters which lead to the photos-the most important part of your layout!

Check in next week for the second part of fonts by Kate!  And I will be back in two weeks for a tutorial on  Title Work!

Ramona here with a tutorial on journaling.  This tutorial will be a bit different than our other tutorials, but I feel it is an important one.  I am a HUGE fan of layouts with more than just photographs.  I love layouts where the whole story is told.  You have a photo or two or five and then writing that describes the event, the memory, the people involved. These are my favorite.  And yet, all too often, I hear people say “I hate to journal” or “I just can’t journal” and it makes me sad.  So, my hope today is to give you some ideas, some tips, perhaps a little confidence to go forward and tell the whole story-not just the half!

First I want to start with a layout I made for a book I’m doing for my inlaws.  I didn’t have any information on the photo, just knew the three people involved.  I scrapped it, and although I think it turned out beautifully, it still feels bare to me.  I want more. I want a memory from the day or perhaps the feelings of this sweet young mother at that time of her life.

Now, to give a little contrast, how about this next layout.  I scrapped this one using a few pictures from a family reunion.  There was nothing fancy about the pictures at all.  I didn’t even think any turned out well and was disappointed that I didn’t get more pictures to scrap with.  However, I did have a few from our wasp adventure, the first night of our reunion when we were having our family BBQ.  By using those little clips and telling the story how I remembered it, I think I captured the memory well and will be enjoyed by everyone who was in attendance that day.

Anyone of those photos, by themselves on a layout would have meant nothing and wouldn’t have made a cute layout.  This is something that will be a fun addition to the family album and will be enjoyed for years to come.

The last layout I want to show you is of an experience where I had no pictures.  These are called photo-less layouts and are some of my favorites!  There are times when it just isn’t possible to capture a photo, but the memory still deserves to be documented.  The story still should be told!

You’ll notice, in my journaling, I didn’t just share the good things that happened that day.  I was honest in what I remembered and that included the monster meltdown my autistic son had.  I believe that it is important to share the good and the bad, the true honest experiences, as they happen-as you remember them!

How do you start?  If you’ve never done much journaling, where do you even begin?

1.  Second Person Narrator:  Be the narrator of your own experience.  This is the type of he did this and she did that.  You write as though you were the fly on the wall telling the events of the day.  This style works great family parties, activities, events, etc.  It’s important to describe as much as you possibly can!  If you think of the photo as half the story then the adjectives you use, the little pieces of detail that you remember fill in the rest.

2.  First Person Narrator:  Here you get to speak to your audience in a more personal way.  This is where you use “I” or “We” and you share the memory from your memory with your perspective.  This way is great for one on one type layouts, baby books, etc.  If you are speaking to a child or a parent or a friend or a spouse, the first person narration is great.

3.  Third Person Narrator:  This isn’t used often in books or writing but can be a great tool for writing something a bit more philosophical.   For example, if you were writing as if you were part of the unknown audience…”imagine if one day you woke to find…”  Again, maybe not used often, but it does have a nice affect for certain layouts.

4.  Poetry/Music:  If you have a picture that you love, but is maybe not tied to a memory, but more an emotion then using poetry to journal is a great tool.  Many can relate to this and sometimes the words of a poem or a song say it better than we know how to.  A back to school clip, a child playing in leaves, close up of eyes, etc. may work really well for this kind of layout.

There are other ways, but these are some basic ideas of where to start!  And honestly, just talking on paper is best of all.  Don’t worry about it being perfect.  Every writer has their own “voice”.  This is what makes each of us unique and I can’t think of a better thing to leave with your children and future generations-then your story told in your own voice.

Ramona here with another tutorial for Well-Versed Wednesday!  Last week, Kate showed us how to use a template to scrap our first layout.  It was a fabulous tutorial, and just in case you missed it, you can find it here.  Today,  I’m going to show you how to save your layout as a web version so you can upload to galleries, facebook or any other online spot-so you can show it off!

First of all, I want to touch on a lesson I learned the hard way, when I was first starting out in digital scrapping.  You will ALWAYS want to save your layout FIRST in a folder, in the size it is as you created it.  And Kate will touch more on that next week-the whole printing and album aspect of your layout.  But please understand that once you make that layout smaller (which is what you will need to do for a web version), you can’t print that one out!  It will be too small and to make it big again, will make it very blurry or pixelated!

I created my daughters baby book all as a digital album.  I hadn’t had a chance to print it, but I uploaded each layout to photobucket.  I was so pleased with myself.  I didn’t realize that in uploading to photobucket, they were automatically shrunk and compressed so they could fit.  Of course, this didn’t affect my layout on my hard drive, but because I hadn’t backed up when my computer died-I lost all of those.  I wasn’t worried at all, because I knew they were safe and sound on photobucket.  Only they weren’t!  When I went to have those printed, they were more like a thumbnail on paper!  I was devastated.

All digital kit papers are created at 12×12 at 300 dpi or at 3600 pixels by 3600 pixels.  This is the size it needs to be in order to have it print at a 12×12 size.  But that size is way too big to upload as a web version.  So, once we’ve saved it in its actual form, we need to shrink it down and resave it as a web version of your layout!  In my mind, I think of them as two separate layouts, and this helps me not lose my original layout!

Here is a layout I created, using Jady Day’s darling “A Boy’s Life” kit.

I saved it to my son’s baby album and then in photoshop CS3, I clicked on Image>>Image Size

clicked on file and found the option  “Save for Web and Devices.  This pulled up a little box:

I changed the resolution from 300 to 72 (do this first!) and then I changed the width and height to 600×600.  Once you have those 3  numbers changed, click okay.  (just a note:  if you changed the dimensions first to the 600 and then adjust the resolution to 72, it will downsize the dimensions even more and then your layout will be too small)

Next, it is time to save it for the web.  Click on File>>Save for Web and  Devices

It will pull up a menu like this:

Several things to check.  Make sure that the preset is set to jpeg for your layout.  I use medium for quality and if you notice the little red box I made in the far left lower corner-there is a number with a K next to it.  You want that number to be under 150, so you can adjust the slider to wherever it needs to be to keep that number under 150.

Once you have that complete, click Save.  I usually save my web versions in the folder with the kit I used.  That way, I know who designed the kit and who to give proper credit to.  It also makes it easy to find when I upload it to a gallery.

Part Two:  Uploading to a gallery

This is one of the most fun parts of digiscrapping, in my opinion! I love to show off my hard work.  My hubby is awesome, but he still doesn’t quite know how to ooh and aah over a layout the way that other digiscrappers can!  So, if you are new to digiscrapping, I suggest that you join a site or two and upload to a gallery!  It is a great way to boost your self-esteem!!

I also have to say that ScrapMatters is one of the best galleries to receive comments!  I have been all over digiland and I don’t think I have ever had my layouts receive as many comments as they do at ScrapMatters!

Now on to the nitty gritty of uploading:

Once you have registered at a site and received confirmation, you are set to go.  Click on the gallery link and you’ll notice in the right hand corner it will say Upload Photo:

That will take you to this menu:

The first drop down menu says Member galleries. This is the default setting, but if your layout is part of a challenge or using a kit that you bought through ScrapMatters, then click on the little area and find where you want to put the layout under.  You can find the name of the challenge or the designers name.

The next section is where you will pull up the layout. Click browse and find your web-version layout.

The next section is for the title of your layout.

The next section is for info about the layout and credits.  It’s always nice to give credit to the designer of the kit you used and if you used a template.  If you are using a kit you got from the store of the gallery you are using and you want to link your product to the product in the store, it is very simple.  In a different screen, find the product page in the store and copy the address.

Then you type [ url = (but leave out the spaces when you do this) and paste the address you just copied.  Next, add ] to close that part off.  Type out the name of the kit and then add [ / url ] (again, no spaces) and then type out by the designer’s name.  When you save, the name of the kit will be underlined and clickable to take anyone to the product in the store!

The next section says keywords.  You can leave it blank or type in a word or two that matches the theme of the kit.

Once that is all done, then you can click Upload/Submit.

It will take you to this page:

On this screen, you can add any optional categories.  For example, if you bought a kit from Jady Day Studios and you used that kit to scrap one of the awesome challenges at ScrapMatters–you could put Jady Day Studios in the first category and then in the second category, find the name of the challenge you completed.

**Another note is that even though it says Member Galleries by default, you do not need to include your layout in it if you are posting to other categories.  You will leave that if you have no other categories to post to, but if you are posting to a designer’s gallery, it will automatically place your layout in your member gallery.  If you include both, it will duplicate your layout in the member gallery and cause confusion if 2 people leave comments on 1 of them and a different 2 people leave comments on the second!

Also, if you added more than one layout in the screen before, you can now add the title and description for each individual layout.  Otherwise, what you added in the screen before, will show up here and you can just double check your work and then click process.

That’s it!  You have successfully uploaded your layout to a gallery and now you can sit back and wait for the comments to come rolling in!  While you are waiting, feel free to look around and leave a few comments yourself-on the other layouts there!