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Using Thumbnails, Templates & Masks

I keep forgetting to tell you where I'm where you can find me, but basically it's a ods dot com you can email me at any time, so if you guys have some way out that you want to share throughout the day, you can send in my way or may make sure you send him through creative life and maybe we'll chat about him later today. You can also get a ten day free trial if you just do forward slashed creative life, my facebook and youtube and pinterest are all different, so I I kind of forget what they are, so I had to pull him up here again. Learn photo editing is the facebook michelle stelling is the youtube channel and then a ods is my pinterest all of these pieces that I showed yesterday I forgot to say and give credit tio snicker doodle design so ever anything you see in my presentation from yesterday was made by, um snickerdoodles signs by karen all right, let's, go ahead and pull up photoshopped elements. As I was looking through some of my old we would talk about the why yesterday a lot. And...

why do we actually kind of spend time doing all of these, um, scrap of pages and a lot of us? For a lot of us it's a hobby and we like to spend our weekends doing it or there's cruz is that you can go on that just you bring all of your photos with you and you create all these layouts and sometimes will say, gosh, you spent a lot of time on your scrapbooks and I really don't want you get tow learn photoshopped elements, you can put him together pretty quickly, but I did pull up this one that I have to show you because it just I remember I had all these high hopes, teo continue on with this idea that I had and we pulled up here day teo, we all we all think we're gonna to certain things every year I was actually taking pictures every month, which is crazy, so I had twelve pictures and I thought, well, I'm going to do months a month and especially when they're younger, they change a lot when they're younger. So I went in there and I started reading some of these things that I had we'll see if I could get this at one hundred percent ok, so right here this is like a year too, so calculators, cellphones, remote control keyboards, the's things are fascinating, my son totally he would pick up everything that looked like it could be broken, of course and so he would walk around the house and this is ah calculator and I forgot about that last night when I was looking at my hash I have that calculator still at home he thought he was talking on the phone to group grandparent's walk around with a little just chatting up a star so when I was looking at this I thought, you know one of the reasons why a scrapbook is because of my memory I don't remember these things you know jaycee started going to the baby sitter two days a week that at that point just things like that weighing twenty eight pounds when people say oh my son weighs this I'm like I can't I have no idea how much my son weighs weighed when he was when he was born yes but after that no idea so just little things that you want to write down and if you can't do it at the time what my sister did she would have a notebook and because she was so busy and we all get really busy just write down the date maybe it two or three things that they did at that time when they took their first step or when they said I think my son's first words were egg roll I don't know why he said a girl but I just remember a girl but I don't remember when he said it so you know all of those little things you think you're going to remember what you just don't um but just some let's see and I have I did it for two years in the night I forgot about it so when I pulled these up I thought, oh gosh, I wish I would have continued that he loves cars he would line his cards up perfectly I think I mentioned that yesterday my husband and I would always go in there and move it just a little bit he come up there and somebody touched my cars so just little things like that everybody has their own stories but a lot of times they're all very, very similar this one I'm sorry I had to put this one up there sorry it says I know this isn't the most appealing picture but this is what jaycee likes to dio at twenty one months digging for gold we always called it are you taking for gold again? So just things like that just crack me up so I thought I would share that with you guys film nails we talked about thumbnails a little bit yesterday and since I'm a graphic designer when I went to a college I studied to be a graphic designer we had to do so many thumbnails and they really do help you to get a little bit more organized with your life and with your actually with your script scrapbook page so before you even start a scrapbook page I would really suggest and I don't practice what I preach all the time is to dio a thumbnail of your layout like for instance, this one very very simple kind of makes me chuckle when I look at it because it's very um you know, two year old could do it and this is what we're going to create the very end of the day this is our collage that we will be creating these right here all our different ideas that maybe when I look through magazines or when I'm surfing the internet I'll just pick up a sheet of paper and sketch it real quickly keep a pile of thumbnails if I ever don't have an idea in my head when I'm sitting down pull my pile of thumbnails out whipped through him and go ok, I have five pictures I could probably do that so just little things like that can make your life a lot easier uh see what I got here and where you're gonna put your photos just put photo one photo to forty three you don't have to know what was going to go in they're different uh you could always do it on grid system as well the's might here might be buttons you can put embellishments this is where an embellishment would go a tag so on so forth it's another idea for a thumbnail so I would suggest even when you're watching tv if you're bored just get out a sketch pad and start doing some different thumbnail ideas all right? So have you guys all heard of templates? Have you ever used who's used a template have you all used to temple before? Ok, make your life a lot easier, right? So that's another thing I suggest because I know that people get freaked out about the creativity part and really what you can do is surf the internet digital scrap designers and see who has some good thumbnails out there. Thumbnails basically are not thumbnail sorry templates let's go back here. Let me pull up the template so you could see what it looks like. Here we go, it's basically a very generic version of a page. Now I want to head and put this little cluster in there just so we know where the placement is but some are templates. You can go ahead and bring in papers from scrap designers and then you can go ahead and clip them into those areas. So right here, when we look at this we're thinking ok, we have a background weaken, put a solid background back there or we can put uh, some papers that she created her patterns like what karen was showing you yesterday you could put a pattern back there this right here this gray, big block could be another paper, a different paper that would stack on top of it. And over here you're going to notice these gray boxes that that's where you're gonna put your photo in. So you notice here we got a tall photo, so you maybe we'll be looking for something that's going to fit in that little space, and then to the right of that it's a pretty standard for by six probably, and in smaller ones right here, so that when you go to look at this template, you think, ok, which photos would probably work pretty good in here? So I first of all gather my photos and the kit that I'm going to be using into that folder so that you're not bouncing all around and looking here looking there, where is that one piece that I wanted to put in? They're all just copy and paste them all into one fault folder first before even get started, so I'm kind of talking about work flow a little bit right now to just to kind of keep you organized. Um, I want to do a little bit of a masking we talked about that yesterday on black conceals and white reveals, and this right here I had to do masking for this, mainly because it does have those rounded corners now yesterday said you could always do it and one two, three or four different ways we want to try to do it the quickest fastest way however sometimes when it's the quickest and fastest it's more intermediate to advanced level so that's why it's important to start from the very beginning and kind of go through the whole process so take take a look at that introduction class if you are a beginner and because this might be a little bit challenging for you the first thing that ideo when I do a mask is I'll go ahead and open up the cluster so here in its cluster it isa png file which means that it is going to be transparent so you're going to be able to see through those little blocks of those little blocks there next I'm gonna go ahead and either way I'm going to place the photo or I'm going to just go ahead and copy and pasted in there from it from that photo but let's just go in and paste it let's go file in place and the photo that I want to use for the bottom one let's do the bottom one first wouldn't place that where we talked a lot about placing and smart objects so this is going to be a smart object you can tell that it's a smart object because of this little icon right here and so that means that we can shrink it down and we can enlarge it without it pixelated so right now I want to head and struck it down I didn't need to shrink it that small, so I'm going to go back in there and enlarge it again. Now, if you were to do this with ah, a photo that was copied and pasted in there, it would have been pixelated and we kind of talked about that yesterday, so I'm gonna place this photo down the bottom left hand corner. The bad part about it is that we have rounded corners and it really doesn't plop in there very well. So what I have to do is I start have to start masking away let's make sure that we can see the whole thing masking away the pieces that are showing underneath, so I'm gonna go to that layer I'm going to click on. This icon is the third icon it's called add layer mask I'm going to make sure I think when you click on that, I think it bounces to black being on top and white on the bottom. But if it's not make sure that you that you change that, but I think once you select that I think it automatically goes there because right before that it was gray, so I'll do the testing on that later to then I'm going to go ahead and get my paintbrush tool and I can start let's do this yes that's right? You just make sure here yeah. All right, so I start with black and I'm gonna start erasing the pieces on the outside now I can change the size of my brush by clicking on my right bracket or my left bracket that's a quickie command tio enlarge or reduce so I'm just gonna go ahead and race most of this another quickly you khun d'oh is you can take the shift key try and get up there quick pull this down you can take the shift key and you can go do a straight line so if I click right here and I hold the shift key and I click again can't get down in there it'll go ahead and give you that straight line I got a little bit too much so I can go control z and then re do it so I come over here hold my shift key down I normally go all the way to the end see how you got that straight line there and you could do that all the way around hold the shift key down click and then I can go in there and just erase all this other stuff it's gonna look more it's going toe you're going to see it more and a top photo we go to the top one and two it someone go file and place get the photo, they want a place on top. Go ahead end pull it over to the left hand side rotated to what you needed to be a lot here doing that same thing that constrain proportions there make sure that that box is checked, rotated by going to a corner and then you can enlarge it. And now what we need to do is clip out the sides so I need to make a mask. First thing I do is I make sure I'm on their proper layer. I go to my masking icon at the top, this is add layer mask, click on that, go over, make sure my black is there, I'm going to click right on the edge here and I'm gonna hold my shift key down. I would try to get it on the edge there so that I can go in there and just erase that and again, I probably would should change the size of that brush to make a little bit bigger. If you do something like this and you mess up, you just go back over, change it toe white and then you can fill it back in that's. The cool thing about masking is it doesn't hurt that original photo if you were to just use the eraser tool into it, you don't have that option to go back in there because it's it's gone I mean you could go come and see a few times but it's ah it's not gonna allow you to bring it back in so I'm just gonna go ahead and mask that out and you can always see on this right hand side the black right here that's where you're masking it click on the shift key to get rid of that and you can get his picky is you want to get usually I just zoom in really really close and right there I missed it by a little couple pixels someone go back and get my brush tool make my brush side little bit smaller and just go ahead and follow along here normally the um border is a little bit thicker so it's a lot faster this is a thin border pretty pretty hard to get exact if you're not zooming in somebody click here hold my shift key down and it gets rid of that okay so making more sense now masking it's really not that bad it's just a little bit takes a little time to get used to I got get down in there let's get my brush tool gotta go backto white wrong layer thank you bottom layer uh oh what ijust dio chelsea my friend here we go you can hit the x on the keyboard and that'll toggle between the two s o if you hit x it'll bring white to the foreground if that's what it was in the background and if you click it again it'll toggle between the two and that's usually what I'll do when I'm demonstrating I'd like to show exactly where I am going to so that you can visually see it but if you want to start using those quickie command you're gonna want to make sure that you you know that one because you're gonna be going back and forth and back and forth all right this is what I need in my head okay, I need to pull myself up on there we go much better all right? So once we're done with that we can go ahead and pull that onto our layout so we can save this off are we can you know say this and keep it for later or we can go ahead and merged them together because we're going to bring you be bringing them in so I'm just going to first take of just keeping it safe I'm going to go file save as and I'm going to save it not as that cluster because you always want to keep that I'm just going to say um cluster mr one and then I'll pull it on over once we have that so let's bring up the template now we wanted to talk about how we use this template so much easier if you have a template to use let's go file and open first thing I suggest is always making a copy of your template cause you might want to use it for another layout so let's pretend we've already made a copy of that but just make sure that you do that as soon as you purchase a template make a couple copies of it so that you have the original so that you can use it down the road so I'm gonna delete this because we just did that we're going to bring it on in I'm gonna go over to file and open up that cluster I'm going tio go ahead and merge them someone a right click merge those layers and then just drag it and drop it into my page and it's going to book all right about there there's a little bit of remnants and there they have to clean up but for the most part it looks pretty good I might enlarge it just well we'll keep it like that that looks fine and I'm gonna go ahead and clean up those edges there and I'll close this out I'll go ahead and keep it as a psd file just in case I want to mess around with it a little bit more but at least now you know how to do that that masking when you get these clusters because some people say how do you do how do you make sure that your photo fits perfectly in there well when it's around corners sometimes it doesn't work so well. You can go back in there, and we did rounded corners yesterday. You could do it that way as well. But you had to sit there and go back and forth and trial on air trial on air. So this way, this masking way is probably the best way to do it. If you know how to mass, ask, if you don't know how to mask, then just use those around the corners and just keep going back and forth until you get that perfect corner.