I often find myself struggling to ensure that I’m present in our family’s scrapbooks. Anyone else have this trouble?

Often, it’s just easier to focus on all of the photos and stories about my children, my husband, and our other friends and family. It’s easy to simply forget to ensure that I’m present, too! Today I’m here to share a few ways for you to easily document yourself and your life when you’re preserving your family’s memories.

One simply way to ensure that you are included in your memory-keeping is to create a monthly “Current Favorites” layout that captures the things you’re enjoying in any given month. It’s almost like adding a time capsule to your scrapbook… you will be amazed at how much these simple memories can transport you back into a time in the past when you are looking through an album!

For myself, I tend to try to capture 12 things that I enjoyed during the month. Things such as… a book I read, a food I loved, a favorite TV show, or even something I worked hard toward throughout that month.

Here are a few examples of the memories I was able to capture during 2015, using this memory-keeping technique…

The thing that I’ve come to love the most about these pages is how easy they are for me to create! I can make them simple… or add a ton of elements. I can create them with photos… or without. I can be super creative and think outside of the box with them… or I can make them very quickly and easily. No matter what, however, they afford me a great way to tell the story of MY life over 12 months. I have loved looking back at my pages over 2015, and it’s so fun to see a full year’s worth of the things that I loved. I know that it will be so fun to continue to revisit these in the years to come!

Other options to make this type of project work better for you…

1. Change the time frame of the pages — you could create them monthly, weekly, or even just quarterly (whatever works better for you and your schedule)
2. Finding and using a consistent template is another way to make page development quick and easy
3. Use the same digital kit for each of your “Current Favorites” spreads, to keep things simple
4. Switch it up and do a “Current Favorites” page for other members of your family, as well (possibly even including your pets!)
5. Use the concept to document particular categories of favorites… such as your favorite foods, favorite TV shows, favorite books, etc.
6. If “Current Favorites” doesn’t work for you, you can even try other titles such as “Random Highlights,” “Month in Review,” or simply “Favorites”
7. Make an entire “Favorites” mini-album to catalog all of your favorites… documenting your thoughts, moods, trends, and treats in one album to enjoy later

I hope this overall idea might give you another way to include yourself into your scrapbooking! It really does add something special to your memory-keeping when you ensure that you and your life are represented! 🙂

Happy scrapping!

About the Author  Amy lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband of  15 years and their 11 year old boy/girl twins. Their 20-year-old daughter recently finished her final year at West Virginia University in December 2016, and will begin graduate school in the fall at Clemson! Amy has been scrapbooking since the early 1990s but discovered digital scrapbooking in 2005 when her twins were born and has primarily scrapped digitally since that time. She is passionate about telling her family’s stories and documenting their life together! Amy is a huge reader (mostly literary fiction), and is a pop culture junkie! She also LOVES all things beauty & makeup!

Today we are going to talk about the crop tool in Lightroom. I absolutely love this tool, and I think you will, too!

Mainly, I love this tool when I am sorting through pictures that I would like to print and put into frames. How many times have you struggled to make the photo you want to print the right size to fit in a particular frame? If you are like me, this happens a lot! That’s where this crop tool comes in really handy.

If you are a Lightroom user, you can find the crop tool in the Develop module within the software program. First, select the picture you want to crop… and then click on “Develop” near the top right. The crop tool is a small rectangle box found just under the histogram. I have highlighted it in the picture below…

When you click on that crop button, you will see a few different options. Click on the one that says ”original” and then, in that drop-down menu, you will see various size options.

The size options are the typical photo sizes: 4×6, 5×7, etc. (basically, the most common frame sizes). There is also a custom option in case you have a frame that does not match the given sizes.

When you select a particular size, a hand icon will appear on your image. You will be able to move your image with this hand and decide what section of your image you want printed and what section you want outside the printed area.

In my image below, you can see that I have chosen the 5×7 size. Once I selected that size… I could then move the highlighted part of my image (shown below with the 9 rectangular boxes) to select the area of my image that I want included when I crop the original…

This next part is what I like the best, however… the option to easily switch between a vertical and a horizontal orientation (portrait or landscape) with a simple keystroke.

See, the thing I struggle with most when framing photos is trying to use a horizontal picture and make it fit in a vertical frame (or vice versa). It is almost like putting a square peg in a round hole, and I have wasted quite a few photo prints trying to do just that! Lightroom has a very easy fix for this, however.

Once you have selected the photo/frame size in your drop-down menu, you can simply press ”x” on your keyboard. The crop orientation will then change from horizontal to vertical and you can go about the business of moving the active area of the photo to crop it down to just the portion you would like to print. Yes, it’s that easy! I use this technique a lot! You can see the vertical crop in the picture below. You can toggle between vertical and horizontal by pressing “x” multiple times.

I hope these simple Lightroom tips and tricks will help you more quickly process and prepare your photos — whether for printing and framing, or for exporting to Photoshop in order to scrapbook them, etc.

If you have any questions… definitely feel free to reach out to me using the comments on this post, and ask away!

About the Author Pallavi resides in the United Kingdom with her husband and their son, Rajveer. She has previously lived in Calcutta, Pune, San Francisco, Chicago, London, and Mexico City. She reflects all these places in her pages as she captures her everyday stories. She is an alumnus of Northwestern University, and currently she is learning photography and working towards getting to a healthy weight. Her days are full and she loves it that way!

Today I am here on the blog to share with you how to use simple extraction techniques to create your own digital elements from journal cards (or similar). This is a fun little trick I find myself using over and over on my layouts… and it is a really easy way to create your own customized embellishments and extend your digital stash!

The journal card I will be using for this tutorial is from Anthology | Pocket Cards by Little Lamm & Co., shown here…

First, you will want to open the journal card you want to use in a photo editing program (I am using Photoshop Elements 10 (PSE10) for this tutorial). Select the Magic Wand Tool on your toolbar…

With the Magic Wand tool, hold down the Shift button and click your mouse on the element/shape you want to remove from the journal card (here, you will see that I selected the orange area). Once it is selected, you should see little “marching ants” around the element…

***TIP*** to select the insides of letters — like the portions of the letters O and E, shown here — hold the shift key and click the inside of the letters so those areas are surrounded by the ‘marching ants,’ too.

Now you will need to right click (with your mouse) on the selected element and it will pull up a menu that looks like the image below. Move you mouse down and highlight ‘Layer via Copy’…

Once you do that, you will see a copy of the selected element in your layers palette. In the layers palette, de-select the original layer of the journal card… and you should be left with the extracted element. Voila! Now you can drag and drop that element anywhere you want onto your layout!

You can see examples of how I used this technique on this layout…

On the layout shown above, I used this extraction technique to create the “stories” circle brush on the top left photo, and also to create the navy word strips (shown at lower left).

Once you know how to extract simple digital elements, the possibilities are endless! You will find that this trick opens up a whole new world… with not only journal cards, but many other items found in digital kits (i.e. you can create a flower sticker from a floral paper… or word art from papers/cards… and more!).

If you try this trick or your own, please share your finished project with us in TDP’s gallery! We’d love to see what you come up with. Happy Scrapping 🙂

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, decorating, and shopping at Target.

Hello everyone! Today I’m here with you on the blog to go over some of the basics of using text boxes, while also exploring some of the lesser-known functions. I will also share some thoughts on how journaling doesn’t always need to be about documentingsomething; it can very well be simply used as a design element.

I will be demonstrating the methods shown in today’s tutorial in Photoshop Elements 11 (PSE11); the information should translate very similarly to other versions of PSE and/or to Photoshop (PS) itself.

So… let’s get started!

1. Using a basic rectangular text box

Choose the text type tool on your tools panel and draw the boundary of the size of the text box that you would like. Once you have done that, you will see the flashing point of the cursor inside the box. Any text you add will be automatically wrapped to fit the boundaries of this box.

Re-sizing: Once you start your journaling, you may realize that you need more (or less) space that you initially thought when you created the text box. Fear not! Simply drag the diagonal corner of the box outward or inwards to the desired size. Note that the default settings in PSE will either make the text smaller or larger to fit proportionally into the newly-sized text box. You will simply need to change the font size back to what it was originally… and then carry on!

2. Adding a bit of flair to the text box

Imagine that you don’t want your text box to be nice and clean (straight lines, etc.). There are some very simple ways to add a bit of a ‘zing’! Consider the warp text tool; it changes the shape of the box (and in the process, the text within it) to create some very unique results. What better way to add some playfulness to your layouts!

3. Using other shapes as text boxes
Text does not have to be limited to the rectangular or square shapes; we can use other custom shapes too. There are many ways to do this… one of which is to actually create a path that follows your shape. Not all versions of PSE have this capability, however, so I came up with a “hack” that allows you to create a faux-text-path, of sorts. 🙂

To do this… choose the shape you want to use, put it onto your page (temporarily), and then with the text type tool selected… follow the same steps as described above. Because the text is on a separate layer from the text, you can approximate the shape you chose with the text itself. Then, once the underlying shape is hidden (something you can do by clicking the “eye” shape to the “off” position in the right-hand layers palette area)… you will have an interesting shape of journaled text…

4. Using Text as a design element

Another way in which text boxes can be used is as a design element. There are quite a few ways to do it. Repeating captions or phrases in an interesting shape, warping text to fit in with the design of the layout, blending it with the photo, etc.

I’ve created a few examples for you here. In the first layout shown below, I have used the text “on a shape” option to write a few phrases in a circular path. Copying this multiple times and nesting the circles within each gives a nice effect…

In this second layout, I have followed he same approach… but instead, I merged all the various text in the shape of the heart and blended it with the background…

As you can see, there are lots of uses for the text box… and fun little tricks you can use to open up its many possibilities and realize the many different ways it can be put to use. If you try some of these tricks or your own, please share your finished project with us in TDP’s gallery!

‘Till next time… keep scrapping and keep sharing. 🙂

About the Author Shivani Sohal is a donner of many alter-egos. A finance professional by day in busy London, she morphs into a seemingly normal mum of two in the evenings and weekends. She is constantly found with her fingers in too many pies and juggling the metaphorical balls. That is living on the edge for her; aided by the two ankle biters and a darling hubby who define the warm and mushy for her. She is ferociously dedicated to memory keeping — almost immune to any nay-sayers (or equally-disruptive crying children or annoying house fires!); keeping her head down and forging ahead at all times.