Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of our Tutorial Tuesday series here on The Digital Press blog! Today, I’ll be sharing ideas for using large photos creatively to emphasize them on your scrapbook layouts!

Have you ever heard the phrase “go big, or go home”? I love it, and I say it to myself quite frequently when creating scrapbook pages that feature my favorite photos. The photos that tug at your heart strings, tell a story or just deserve a large spot in your scrapbooks, those are the photos I am talking about!

A big photo makes a statement, and is the perfect way to showcase a photo that tells a story. Use one large photo to fill the entire background of your layout!  Photos that work perfect for this are ones that show the entire landscape or are a wide angle shot with lots of white space. You can add more photos in the white space of your photo as I did on the layout below. Frames help to ground the photos you place over top of the background photo and help tie multiple photos together cohesively on a layout.

Tip: Use the opacity slider to make your background photo look more transparent. This can give the photo a look of a faded memory! If you layer your photo on top of a textured cardstock, it will take on the textured look of the paper below it!

Trick: Frame your large photo to give it more definition on the page. Use stitching or other attachments to anchor your photos and elements to the large photo. That way they don’t look like they are just floating on top of your background photo!

Trick: use a template as the guiding point for your design. Fill the background layer of that template with a large photo and work from there. On the layout below I started with this photo of the skyline and added other favorite photos from our vacation on top of it.

A large horizontal or vertical photo can be used in its natural shape on a scrapbook page by layering patterned papers and embellishments below it. You still get the emphasis of a large photo layout, without filling the entire page with the photo.

Large photo layouts are the perfect way to document a conversation or quote you want to remember from the moment the photo was taken. Keep your design simple and let the photo shine! Not only does the large photo speak volumes, the words you document right on top of it will help to recreate the story from that single moment!

Tip: Use the white space on your photo to write your journaling.

So there you have it… a few simple tips and tricks to use large photos for emphasis on your scrapbook pages.  I hope this has inspired you to use a large photo on your next layout!

Jennifer Hignite is a mom of three boys and new homeowner with her fiance in the mitten state of Michigan. When she is not scrapbooking, she enjoys photography, watching her boys play sports, decorating, and shopping at Target.

met·a·da·ta
ˈmedəˌdādə,ˈmedəˌdadə/
noun — a set of data that describes and gives information about other data

There is a lot of information stored here — and under the “Basic” tab is where we will type our information.

You are welcome to edit other fields if you wish, but all I do is fill in the “Description” box. I type in any product names (kit, template, etc.), as well as the actual links to the products in the shop (especially important for creative team members who are posting layouts into galleries)…

After entering the information, select “OK.” After this step, you’ll want to re-save your layout (to ensure the new changes to the metadata stay put).

I hope that taking this extra step becomes a habit for you, too, and that it eventually will become a huge time-saver when you are posting your beautiful creations into online galleries like the gallery at The Digital Press!

About the Author  Amie is a craft-loving dental hygienist who lives in Washington state. She loves her husband, her two crazy kids, and her English Bulldog… as well as coffee, baking cupcakes, daffodils, glitter & sprinkles, reading a good book, and lip gloss — not necessarily in that order.

Hello everyone, and welcome to yet another edition of our Tutorial Tuesday series here on The Digital Press blog! Today, I am going to share a few very simple tips for creating hierarchy on a layout in order to create a focal point.

The definition of “hierarchy” by the Oxford Dictionary is: “a system in which members of an organization or society (or photos on a scrapbooking layout) are ranked according to relative status or authority.”

I love using multi-photo layout designs in my memory-keeping, as they give a great overview of the context of the photos as well as up-close details of the event. But the question becomes… how to include so many photos without them all competing too much for attention? How to focus on the most important part of the story?

For example, let’s use the following group of photos as an example…

Step 1. Six same-sized photos will be “read” from the top left, across and then down to the second row… left to right… in our Western culture. But I want a way to cue the viewer as to which photo is more “important”…

Step 2. As you can see, I experimented with making the first photo smaller and the “after” photo of her hair much bigger. Just by changing the photo size I draw more attention to it (in a similar way, keeping one photo in color and converting the others to black and white would create the same sense of hierarchy). Then, to cement the large photo’s importance, I add the embellishments, layering them to be eye-catching and to add a pop of contrast in the glittery gold border and the light viewfinder, which also contrasts as a circle shape below the rectangles of the photos. I also add a large flower to visually anchor the photo, and add a subtle cue to the colour of her Dance dress, finally adding a pop of dimension and movement with the floaty string.

Step 3. I begin my second hierarchical cluster with the gold date tab. This is the final photo in the sequence, showing her delight at the finished view of her hair. I add some more gold wire elements to complete that visual triangle. A second smaller flower and layer some gold splatter under that cluster. The point of the heart faces into the photo.

Step 4. My third cluster at the top left is the entry point into the layout. I add the third circle element, the third pop of the pinky-purple in the wordstrip, and finally three spots of stitching. The third cluster is the least dense, made up of smaller elements… so while it serves as an entry point into the layout’s design, it does not steal any of the focus away from the focal photo.

Step 5. This is when I usually save the layout, make a cup of tea, and then come back to re-evaluate it later. At this point, I decide to move the paper clip into the top cluster and add a curled ribbon up there. This is pretty and plays off the curls within her hairdo. I add the journaling at the top of the layout in a white hand-written font so that the eye will now be led from the top left, through the top row of the photos, down to the date tab and then from right to left across the bottom row of photos. This solidifies the circular movement into the foundation of the design. 

Step 6. I resize, sharpen and save it.

I hope that this post has given you some ideas and tips on how to create a focal point within a layout (especially one that uses a large number of photos). I hope you’ll give it a try and create this sort of flow within your next scrapbooking layout.

About the author Stefanie is a member of The Digital Press creative team and a stay at home mother of three older children living in Cape Town, South Africa with her hubby of 30 years, two of their three children, and 3 Siamese cats. She loves photography, traveling, and digital scrapbooking — documenting the good and the ordinary everyday.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of our Tutorial Tuesday series here on The Digital Press blog! Today I hope to inspire you to try out combining multiple photos to tell a more complete story with just a single picture.

I always struggle a lot when it comes to choosing the one perfect photo to scrap into a page. I’m the type of photographer who is always running around with a camera around my neck, constantly trying to catch up with the people I’m with because of the many photographs I’m shooting. I often run a bit ahead and then stand still with my camera ready to photograph my loved ones as they walk towards me or as they are passing by. For this tutorial I had a couple of pictures that I took during a walk through the woods. Since they are quite similar (taken from the same position) and I couldn’t decide which one I liked the best, I thought it would create a fun effect to combine these photos to create one single picture that would show a more complete story of our walk.

A great way to start is to open one of the pictures in a photo-editing program like Photoshop. I’m using Photoshop CC for this tutorial. Once a new file is created you can quickly create a better overview before adding the other photos by enlarging the canvas using the cropping tool. Then you can easily drag and drop the other photos in the same file. By changing the opacity of the photos to around 50 percent you’ll be able to position them on top of each other in a way that they almost blend perfectly. When it comes to positioning the photos, aligning the surroundings of the subjects is more important than the borders of the photos.

When you turn the opacity of the photos back to a 100 percent, you’ll might see that the borders of the different photos don’t align perfectly or are too harsh to look perfectly merged. We can improve this by erasing some of the edges and making it softer. It’s possible to do this with the eraser tool, but I always prefer using masks so the alterations aren’t permanently. You can add a vector mask to the selected layer by clicking on the mask icon in the layers window at the lower right of the screen.

When the vector mask is added to the selected layer a white rectangle appears next to the image of the layer. By clicking on this rectangle, the vector mask is selected and now editable. A brush can be selected to start removing some parts of the photo. Make sure the foreground color is set to black, since everything that’s white in the vector mask remains visible and every part that is made black becomes invisible. I always prefer using a brush that has some softness so the blending border looks more natural, but not too much softness that it’s starting to look blurry. I would recommend setting the hardness of the brush on a number somewhere between 50 and 90 percent, depending on the sharpness of the photo and the alignment of the other photos underneath. With the black foreground color selected you can now start removing the outer parts of the photos to make their transitions invisible. By changing the transparency of the photos you’re not editing, you have better sight on what you’re doing. As you can see in the picture underneath I never remove bits in a straight line. By making the border irregular or following some distinct lines in the photo like a tree trunk, the overlapping border will become almost completely invisible.

To make sure no stray pixels remain after erasing you can always apply a stroke in a distinct color on the layers to make the unwanted bits visible. When you’re happy with the gained result after erasing the borders and unnecessary overlapping parts of the different photos, you can determine how big the final picture is going to be. By using the cropping tool you can alter the canvas to the maximum complete width and height of the picture or make it a bit smaller if desired.

After the cropping is applied you’ll see the complete result of the combined picture you have created. To make the picture even more aesthetically pleasing you can now play around with levels, curves and saturation. Because I found that the pictures always turn out a bit darker when printed, I like to increase the curves layer a bit to lighten the picture and make it pop a bit more. You can easily do this by moving the point in the graph of the Curves Properties panel. By adding more points to this graph by simply clicking on it you are also able to increase or decrease the contrast of the picture.

Now the picture you have created is completely finished and ready to be scrapped into a beautiful layout! Because I liked the effect of the picture I combined so much I chose to use it as big as possible on my layout. For the layout I created with this picture I used several scrapbook kits from the July 2018 Special Edition section of The Digital Press website, which proved to be a perfect match. The finished layout I created can be seen underneath.

(credits: Into The Woods | Collection by Little Lamm & Co and Hooray, It’s Saturday! | Kit by Ninigoesdigi)

I hope I have inspired you to try out combining your own photos into one complete picture and I hope you’ll have a lot of fun with it!

About the Author  Sharon-Dewi is an industrial engineer with her own design company and a teacher at a technical university in the Netherlands who loves to spend every little bit of free time she gets capturing and documenting the special moments of her life and that of her loved ones by creating scrapbooks. She can often be seen running around with a camera in her hands and she is a big fan of anything Disney-related. One day she hopes to be able to permanently live at the happiest place on Earth!