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Making the Digital Template Your Own

Lesson 10 from: Design Digital Scrapbook Layouts in Photoshop

Traci Reed

Making the Digital Template Your Own

Lesson 10 from: Design Digital Scrapbook Layouts in Photoshop

Traci Reed

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Lesson Info

10. Making the Digital Template Your Own

Lesson Info

Making the Digital Template Your Own

I'm going tio go in and shadow just a few things these air, the shadow styles that we covered in the shadowing class there included with the shadowing class, so I'm just going to go in, and I'm gonna add the paper shadow to the things that need to be shadowed. Now, if you go in here with a template and you select, if you try and select it, it's going to select the paper that you clipped to the hex on and not the texting on. So when you add a shadow to that, it won't show up these air already shadowed, but I don't like their shadows a lot of times they're not going to work with what you want your layout to be, so I'm going to make sure I go in and select the hexagons, so I'm going to click on the papers and then I'm gonna make sure that I select the hexagon instead of the paper and change the shadows anyway. I would do that for the whole way out, we're not going to sit here and shadow that entirely out, but you definitely want to go in here and shadow these letters you want to make sure...

that everything works, but so this is a great lay out, I like it. It works for me the template was nice without a color to this frame so it doesn't look like the template we'll make it a stroke frame okay, but what happens when uh it doesn't quite fit your style? You don't you don't really like the end product what can you d'oh um you can you can actually add to your templates so let's say that I had another photo here that I wanted to use, but I didn't want to go find a two photo template or maybe I I want to use this photo vertically instead of horizontally you could actually just come in here and make sure you pick the frame and the photo mask and just click those two if you hit command instead of shift it will just click I will just select what you are clicking on and you could just rotate this because your photo was clipped to it instead of cut you just rotate this up and adjust it now I drug my photo in it's a smart object so I can resize it to make it a bit larger because it's not rest arised the networks but now I have to move my my temper my title around happy needs to come somewhere else they don't really like it there doesn't read very well so I'm just going to put it down here and I'm gonna make all of the letters a bit smaller so it's select him off happy birthday and that works too we have all of the letters they're hard to read let's shut him altogether you and that works to and now if I want to come in and add another photo I have another photo from this photo shoot I want to put on here I'm going tio make sure it's like the frame and the photo layer and I'm gonna hit command j to copy them and they will copy to where the highest layer is so they moved both the photo and the frame on top of the original photo and frame and so I'm gonna rotate it horizontally because I think that the photo I want his horizontal and I'm not gonna worry about the the button and the other thing yet let'sjust drag in the photo and see if I like it okay and now that I have that settled I can sew like both buttons and the banner and we could just move it a little bit so it's not on top of his face I can't even come in and make this whole thing smaller so that it aligns with the banner and all of that so it's really easy to use templates and not only to use them but to even after you've used them to change them up and add to them and make sure that you really like the way that they look now you can also do the same thing with templates before you use them so maybe you have a limited selection of templates or maybe you have a certain designer that you really like that um is retired so let let's open this up this is how the template came out of the box and perhaps um it's too much white say spoke this isn't threat one of everyone this is how the template came out of box so maybe it's a little bit too much white space around the edges we can just come in and duplicate layers and edit them there's no rules that says that you have to use um template as they come you khun totally adjust them to make them work for you so you can do it this way. Or how about we have different photo orientations than what this photo are? This template is calling for so we can rotate it, we can rotate it ninety degrees and now we have a completely different orientation than the original one and of course we're not going to like this title here we're not gonna run our title vertically up the page but perhaps we can put it here we could always put it here and move the journaling a little bit anything we want maybe we want the big photo on the top weaken just flip it vertically and alter it that way or maybe instead of three photos, we want one big photo you can either you can do it one of two ways you can just drag this down, but it is gonna be huge. I get too much larger it's going to distort your photos or distort the edges of the photo when you clip it so you could do it that way or you can believe it altogether and just draw a new photo always from the center a new photo box with your shape tool don't make sure it's liked make sure shape is selected in our path and just write yourself a whole new photo box so we still have the paper strips on the side that were in the template design. But now we have a completely different template than what we started with last but not least let's revert this all the way back to where we started. Um what if we need more photos in this? We can let's just delete this journaling block altogether and I'm just going to stretch in this example that stretch this to the side so we have a little bit more room. You want to move all of these photos over and then I'm going to duplicate these two boxes by command option and shift to drag and now we have two extra photos but with the same original design of the template that we really like so there's so much that we can do with our templates this's one template that we just did one, two, three, four, five new ways and it was so easy you saw how quickly I did that it was just a few a few clicks before you start and you're good to go it's really great for, um the people who don't have a lot of templates but want to reuse them people have used the same template over and over and over again. So does this change the way that you look at templates? Has anyone had any revelations in the chat room? John well, they have because sooner is saying they haven't realized you could delete the temp, the template placeholders and not use them a toy for you know, if they were there, you have to use the I know you've been doing if I wanted to do everything on this temple and just keep the paper strips it's totally your product once you buy, you can do whatever you want with it it now sparrow april saying I just spent so much time there trying to find a select fonts when they use in the actual when they're using the alphabets they think they'd be better off having a handful of favors is that how you work? You know there are certain types of a typeface that you like there are I always use that same typewriter fonts for continuity within my pocket scrapbooking lee up, but, yeah, there are a few journaling fonts that I use over and over and over again because you don't want to have so much that you totally demolish your scrapbooking time just trying to pick a font if you and not to mention the fact that if you have one point five million fonts and solved your computers could be so slow, it slows down the entire process now, scrapping for four fleer I think it is was saying that when you first opened up the temple, did you save as a new file so that your temper it is not? I didn't know I did not, but that's because with photo shop, it has an auto say function it doesn't destroy your original template. What it does is it it creates a temporary file every few minutes, saving you're working your progress with if you have a photo shop, c c s o the need for saving so that you don't lose your work all the time isn't necessary, so I'm never gonna hit safe to save over this photoshopped template are this template? I'm never gonna have that issue because if my compute computer were to crash right now, it will have saved what I am working on. So but if you are worried about that or if you don't have a version of photoshopped that auto saves you can always re save it before you start great thank you now traces this a twelve by twelve that you've been working in it is a tile by tile tonight would you be able to show how to change that into they say a different size and eight and a half by eleven? Or is it just a question of just recently I can make you could make any temple in a different size? Of course if it's the same ratio so if it's an eight by eight it would be easier if you would just go to file her image image size and then you would change it to eight by eight and I would do at the end I like even though I save all of my layouts andy by eight um I don't scrapbook an eight by eight because, um everything is size every product that you buy size for a twelve by twelve layout so I like to start with talbot twelve and then say as an eight by eight so if it were if you want to meet by eight, you would wait till the end and you would say it was me by but what happens if you want any and a half by eleven um that's a completely different size ratio and what happens is let's let's make it the first thing I would do on a template is I would change the size to be the largest size of the new ratio so I would do if it's an eight and a half by eleven that I'm going to reduce the whole thing down to eleven inches to begin with so now it's an eleven inch square that way I can now change the canvas size which is image canvas size which is different than your image size your image size is going to change your whole image together your canvas eyes changes the size of your campus so if I were to do and a half by eleven you can see that it cross it now it's vertical and it crops off a lot of my stuff. Well, I would normally do this before I would start scrapbooking because if you get to this point in your scrapbook page now everything's cut off it's going to be kind of a pain to go back in and move everything around. Everything is still here if I try and select things that are outside the campus area is still there but I've done all this work and now I have to do more work tio start over so let's go to this one that hasn't been um added to yet and let's change it to an eight and a half by eleven if we want to do eleven, nine and a half, I'm gonna change my canvas sized eight and a half and you can see with this template is still cut stuff off, so I'm just going tio reduce the size slightly. I'm not going to like the background layer just, um, all of the paper and embellishment layers and holding downshift, and also that it constrains proportions and reduces from the center. I'm just going to make it a little bit smaller until it fits. And now from his home by twelve template having eight and a half by eleven template, you can also do the same thing like let's say you were doing pocket scrapbooking. You can also make a four by six let's change the size, tio, I'm gonna make it out of horizontal for my six, so I'm going to change the wit to six inches and then I'm going to change the size, the heights to four inches and one more time I'm going to resize everything just a slightly smaller. This is great for pocket cards for bragg books, anything like that, you could take any template and really make it any size you want. Now the problem is going to be, if you have templates that are so super embellished. The smaller that you go, the smaller everything is going to be. So you have to really make sure that you start with templates that are going to be conducive. Tio a smaller format, and this one is fine. This one will work for a smaller format just fine.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Bonus Slip In 1
Bonus Slip In 2
Pocket Life - August Kit
Bonus Coupon - Sweet Shoppe Designs
Bottums Up Template
Layout Design 1
Layout Design 2
Layout Design 3
Layout Design 4
Traci's Photo Workflow Actions

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Great series of classes! For anyone from beginner to advanced Photoshop user, you will get something from these classes! Traci is a great teacher and easy to understand why she works the way she does. I would highly recommend these classes to anyone wanting to learn tips and tricks from a great scrapbook designer!

Krista
 

I'm currently halfway through the courses, and I am so glad I decided to watch these. I haven't been scrapping for very long, and am mostly self taught through tutorials found on the internet and youtube. I found that various concepts weren't explained to me (how to really use a template, designer intentions, how to use other layouts for inspiration) and so I sort of hit a wall trying to get further in scrapping digitally. This course basically broke down the walls and provided me with so much info and inspiration that I feel really comfortable in taking my efforts further. Whereas before I was thinking that I might always be stuck with a mediocre result :) thank you Traci!!

Student Work

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