Its an Oscraps Blog Hop!

Welcome to the Oscraps DSD Blog Hop! This week we are celebrating digital scrapbooking!! Any of you who read my blog on a regular basis know that I am addicted to digi-scrapping and Oscraps.

Your word here at my BLOG is {the world}. Collect all of the words to form a quote, e-mail the complete quote to bloghop @ oscraps. com to be entered into a drawing for the grand prize!!

As a thank you gift for stopping by my BLOG, I have this FREEBIE for you!! It is a Quick Page using the Oscraps’s Collab Kit, Otono

You can download it here: Autumn Days Quick Page

Here is a preview to the full kit- just amazing as always:

Thanks for hopping around our O-Team Blogs. Your next stop is here at the gorgeous Holliewood Studios!

If you need to get to the  the start of the Blog hop, go here! Ohhhhhhh…start here for the fun!!

Happy Digital Scrapbook Day (so we like to party a bit more at the O, and made it into Digital Scrap “Week” )

Anatomy of a Layout 2

I loved being able to walk other Photo Editor users through the process of making a cool digital layout. Here is my second layout that I am going to scrap with you, step by step.

The first thing I decided to do was to make the photo a bit more interesting. It is one of my favorites and I have scrapped it before. To make it a bit different, I am going to selectively keep the color of the pumpkin, and put the rest of the photo in gray scale.  It  looks like  it should be a really tricky technique, but actually it is so simple.

Open the picture you want to use in Photo Editor. Duplicate the photo with Ctrl-D. The top photo is the one  I am going to change to black and white. To do this, click on the top photo or click on the top layer in the Object Palette.  Depending on your layout, you can do this in one of several ways.  You click on Adjustments| Color and then you can use:

• Gray scale- for an automatic grey scale conversion
• Hue/Saturation- if you want to have more control over the saturation level
• Sepia- if you prefer an antique tone

I chose plain old gray scale for this one, but the other options would have worked as well.

Next, select the eraser tool. Choose a hard brush tip, Make sure the Spacing Setting is for 1 pixel, so it doesn’t “scatter.”

Eraser over the part of the gray scale photo that you want the color to show,using the Magnifying tool to get into the smaller spaces. Group both Objects Layers together by selecting them,  and Right Click on “Make Group.” Save the photo, and close it. It will remain in your Image Basket.

Next, I have selected  two papers for the background. The bottom paper is a relatively plain orange and peach paper. The second paper is an antique tan, with newsprint shapes cut out on it. I am going to use the “Transfer Modes” to blend the two papers into one. I select the papers while in Photo Manager and drag them into Photo Editor.  I open the plain paper first, and then the patterned paper on top. Click on the top paper to select it, then go to the top right or bottom right of the screen where it says Transfer Mode. Scroll through the modes until you find one that works well with your page. For this layout, I am using Hard Light. If you want to lower the opacity of the paper, you can use the Opacity Sliders to the left of the transfer Mode boxes.

Next I drag my photo from the Image Basket to the page, then a frame. Once I have them positioned where I want them, I can Make Group with them too. Don’t forget to keep saving your work as you go!

Add whatever other elements and word art you’d like. Then you can add your Drop Shadows ( Object | Drop Shadow) to anything that needs it, like the frame and leaves.

Here is my finished layout:

Credits: Everything is from Oscraps New Collaboration Kit Otono, coming soon to Oscraps.com

Using ACDsee Photo Manger to find a specific designer

This is a great tip for anyone who is doing a designer specific challenge or doign CT work.

Right now I am working on a Challenge at Oscraps for Merkeley Designs. It is the October GOT IT Challenge. One of the requirements of this challenge is to use at least 50% or more Merkeley Designs products. I love Merkee’s designs and have a lot of them in my scrap stash.

When I organize my supplies, I use the Author Box to keep track of the designer’s name.  To easily find everything by her, I can go to the “Organize Pane” and click on the + sign next to Author.

When the Author List generates, click on the  designer’s name, in this case Merkeley Designs, and every file with that name will be brought up. If you have more than one name for the same Author, such as here with misspellings, select all  variations to get all of the files.

When the file list is complete, go back to the Properties Pane, Select All (Ctrl-A) and click in the Author Box. When the “Reset author for all selected files?” box pops up, click Yes. Type in the correctly spelled name. This will then apply the right name to all of the files.

For more information on using the Author property,  read:

• Customizing your thumbnails in ACDSee Photo Manager
• Auto Category Question: I have a misspelled author or designer name. How do I get rid of them?

Back to the Challenge….

Now that I have all of Merkeley Design’s supplies come up, I can now easily scroll through everything I have of her’s. I will Ctrl-click on each of the papers and elements I want to use in my layout, then drag them into ACDSee Photo Editor, Once I have them in the Image Basket, I can get right down to scrapping!

Making a Photo Disk in Photo Manager

I love being able to use ACDSee to make Photo Disks. It saves so much room on my hard drive, but is also keeps those photos accessible to me.

I just got a DVD full of pictures from my daughter’s birthday last week from the in-laws. I know I am going to want to scrap them and there are a lot of great shots to choose from. I don’t have lots of extra room on the hard drive (who does??) so right now, as I type, I am making a Photo Disk from the DVD.

To do this, I put the DVD in the drive. After Photo Manager is done reading it, I go to New| Photo Disk. I enter “Caitlyn Birthday 2009″ as the Photo Disk Name. Then I select the Folders that I want to have cataloged in the “Specify Folder DIaloge Box.” This is a nice feature if there is more than one Folder on your DVD/CD. For example, on this DVD, there are two Folders, one with photos of my daughter and nieces, the other … I don’t have clue! I only have to have the appropriate folder checked, and the other one will not be part of the Photo Disk.

When that is done, I can go back and tag my photos. I am tagging these with the Categories of “Caitlyn” and “Birthday.” Then I Embed the Metadata into these selected files.

To use these files, click on the Offline Media Folder in your Folder tree.

When you click on the folder it will bring up thumbnails of each photo. These are not the actual photo files, but an ACDSee generated thumbnail. The “real” files are still located on that DVD. Click on the photo that you want to use, and a box will pop up telling you the name of the CD or DVD that the file is located on. Insert that disk in the drive,  let ACDSee Photo Manager read the disk and there is the photo you want to use.

Design Class Using Photo Editor

I was hanging out over at RAKScraps.com when I saw a designing Class being offered. It is a basic class, good to get your feet wet.

I know that I have a lot of great possibilities when I am using Photo Editor to scrap, but I was wondering how well I could do with the designing aspect.

So far, I have made a sheet of different brads and 4 sheets of plain paper. Not bad. I am looking forward to having more time to play around!

Paper Tutorial for Photo Editor 2008

Designing a Paper in Photo Editor

I am using a color scheme from http://www.colourlovers.com/palette/807471/girlfriendfactory

1. Open New Document (Ctrl-N). To Select the color, for the background, click on Custom in the drop down box. Click on the small box next to it to choose your color. You can either find a color using the cursor or you can enter a HEX code in the box on the bottom left. I have entered a HEX code from the color scheme I found on colourlovers.com. Click OK.

1. Make sure your settings are at 12 x12 and 300 dpi and click OK.
2. Now you need to save this as a jpg . Close the file. Double click on the paper that is in your Image Basket. This will open the jpg paper up as its own layer in your Object Palette.

1. Click on the paper and then go to Adjustments| Noise| Add Noise. Choose your settings that you want. Here I am selecting an Intensity of 50, Gaussian and Monochromatic.
2. I want a soft but splotchy feel to this paper, so next I am going to use Adjustments| Artistic| Oil Paint. Play around with the, Brush width, Variance and Vibrance until you get a look that you like.
   I used a Brush Width of 17, Variance of 40 and Vibrance of 3.
3. Now I want to add some interest to it. Using a Swirlie Q brush by Carla Gibson, I am going to stamp swirls onto the paper.
4. As I stamp the swirls, they can be rotated and resized just as a regular object can be. Click on the Navigation Tool (the arrow) then on the object layer. The stamp will have a bounding box that can be resized by dragging the corners.

1. I want to mirror these swirls in the opposite corner. To do this, Select all layers and Create Group. Click Ctrl-D to duplicate the layer. Then you rotate the layer and place it on the top right corner. Then I am going to resize by clicking on the layer and dragging on corner on, to make it smaller. I also added in a third color from this palette with some small swirls for additional depth.

1. Save your project as a jpg at 100 quality.

If anyone would like to downlaod the paper, use this link.

Anatomy of a Layout with Photo Editor 2008

One of the designers that I CT for, Nina Scraps, just put out an amazing bunch of products over this past weekend. I decided that I wanted to really make a special layout to showcase her talent. I was so pleased with the results, that I wanted to share it here, along with some instructions so you can use some of these techniques as well.

My first step was to chose a picture that would work with her new set clip.your.pic I opened both files up in ACDSee Photo Editor 2008 (PE)I dragged the photo onto my work space and then the clipping mask on top of it. I adjusted the size of the clipping mask to best fit the photo. Selecting both object layers, I then “Trimmed to Shape”. I saved the clipped photo as a png  and then closed the photo in my workspace. The png is still in my Image Basket.

I wanted to use a template so I chose a new psd template made by timounette, another CT member. (keep your eyes open on Nina’s Blog because there might be a template challenge coming soon ) I opened the template in PE and saved it immediately as an apd file. From there, I went to  Photo Manager and selected some colored paper, word art, and flowers from Nina’s Kit, my.number.one and a gorgeous new background paper from blanchatre. I dragged them right into PE, but you can also use Ctrl-E to open files into your editor.

The background paper went on first. I moved it down to the bottom layer and deleted the template background.Next I dragged the colored papers, one at a time, onto the template, selected the template layer and paper layer together and then used the “Trim to Shape” button to clip the paper to the template shape.

I wanted a bit more embellishment on this layout, so I grabbed a paint smear from Touch.of.color.2 and placed that under the rectangles. It had a hard edge on one side so I used a soft eraser brush to blend the side a bit. I added some flowers to the layout. Then I wanted to add some word art, but I didn’t want a harsh contrast to the very muted background.  After dragging the word art onto the background, I moved it to just on top of the background layer. I tried out each of the different Transfer modes, until I found that the “Difference” blending mode achieved the look I wanted.

The color of the word art that I chose was originally a bright red, which did not fit the mood of this layout. To give it this deep brown color, I selected the word art, then clicked on Adjustments|Color|Colorize. I played around with the hue and saturation until I found the right color I had envisioned.

The last steps were to add a soft drop shadow to the photo and the paper strips. I used a lighter grey  color and a smaller offset then the default settings to keep with soft and muted tone.

I save my projects often, but after I am done, I will use the Save to Web option so get it ready to be uploaded to my gallery.

You can see by this description how easy it is to create a beautiful layout using PE, using many different digital scrapping techniques. I hope that you like this layout as much as I do!

ACDSee for Mac

I don’t have a Mac-I have wanted one for a long time. Everyone I know that uses a Mac adores it.

Right now, I don’t have the money for one, but if someone every just handed me one, I wouln’t turn it down. And now, if someone handed me one, I’d be even more excited because ACDSee has just released a beta version of Pro 3 for Mac. This is really huge news for photographers and digital scrapbookers.

The information is on the ACDSee Website.

here’s a really cool screen shot from ACDSee’s website:

I want this!

How cool is this? I don’t have a digital picture frame, although I would really like one some day. With all of the digital scrapbook layout that I do, I would love to find a way to share them. Instead, they sit, lonely on my hard drive

But this is really neat, since you don’t have to have a digital frame to use this software. It can be hooked up to my TV, since it is connected to a computer. Don’t ask me why or how, that type of question goes directly to Gary. All I know is thta we can watch streaming video fromthe computer on our TV. Pretty neat.

Anyway, I could put my digital LO’s on a memory stick or DVD, out in the computer and run it with this software, and see them on the big screen.

Eventually I would love a digital frame, and this software would just make it easier to use.

This is some info:

• Picture Frame Manager connects the computer with any removable memory device such as a picture frame, SD card, USB drive or other portable display that mounts as a mass storage device.
• Once connected, drag-and-drop features make loading, moving, changing or deleting images a snap.
• To increase memory capacity, the software optimizes images for frames of any size or resolution, even for today’s high-definition television screens. Because each image is set to the correct resolution for each frame, up to 10 times the amount of images can be stored and displayed.
• Picture Frame Manager makes waiting for photos to display a thing of the past. All types of decodable image files, including TIF, GIF, PNG and RAW-format files from today’s DSLR cameras, are converted automatically to JPEG format, ensuring smooth, professional transitions every time.
• Users can manage multiple frames at the same time and save settings for each frame.

You can get more info on the ACSDsee Website.

ACDSee Releases Photo Manager 2009

I just got my new copy of ACDsee Photo Manager 2009 yesterday.

I am having fun playing around with it. Much of the software works identical to PM 10, but there are several neat improvements. Here is a list of some of the new features:

Staying organized with new tools from ACDSee

The new Import tool puts this power into the hands of users, who can now rename, back up, categorize and add keywords to images as they are acquired from a camera, card reader, CD/DVD or other storage device. Used in conjunction with ACDSee Photo Manager’s Auto Categories, which automatically organizes images according to camera metadata, organization is completed as collections grow.

Protect and share custom organization

ACDSee users love that they can supplement camera metadata (IPTC and EXIF) with their own custom metadata, including categories and ratings, in ACDSee Photo Manager. Customers can now protect and share this custom information with other ACDSee users by embedding it into their images. Users who manage many image types can now include important information even with file formats that don’t support camera metadata, such as PNGs, PDFs and GIFs.

Frame and share photos

Photographers can quickly and creatively add a finishing touch with a custom border, drop shadow or edge effect, then share favorite images with friends and family with quick uploaders to online tools like flickr. Users can show off photos in auto slide shows and screensavers that now include creative presentation options such as pan & zoom, black & white and sepia effects and music.

Save originals

ACDSee Photo Manager automatically saves and preserves the original image file when it is first opened for editing within the software. Users can restore to the original at any time after making image edits like adjusting colors, cropping or adding creative elements, such as borders, frames and effects.

Save searches

Users can build complex searches based on folder name, file name, location, custom categories, ratings and other metadata, then save time by storing custom search criteria for future use.

However, the one new feature that I think everyone is really going to like is the ability to add keywords to images as you download them from your camera card or a CD/DVD. If you are like me and take a zillion pictures at a time, this tool is going to be so helpful. For example, I took approximately 70 pictures of my daughter Caitlyn’s birthday. When I import them off of the camera reader, I can add the keywords “Caitlyn” and “birthday” and PM will tag them automatically. Then when I want to use them in a scrap layout,  I can find them using a quick search.

Here is a Screenshot of this:

You can add your keywords right in that box- on this photo I typed in “pets” and “Merlin” so next time I am looking for a picture of Merlin, my darlin’ kitty, it will come right up.

This is going to be a very helpful feature for all of us scrappers who want to find pictures of a certain person or event and we have hundreds to go through.

Props to ACDSee for making scrapping that much easier to do!