WITL: Album Assembly, Part Deux

Hey kids. Shall we get right to it then? Ok.

Yesterday was a photo extravaganza, as I expected. I'm going to walk you through my process.

1) First up - splash photos for my journaling pages. I have my photos sorted by day of the week in iPhoto. Since this pic will be the splashiest, most singled-out shot of the day, I decided to look for the best LANDSCAPE oriented photo that just seemed to say, "This is MONDAY, or Tuesday or whatever." I know I'll only really be able to use portrait oriented shots for the baseball page protector slots - so I'm reserving them for use there.

Then I just created a paint filled box in it's own layer in Photoshop and "clipped" the photo into that box so it was exactly the size I needed:

Then I turned OFF all the layers I didn't want to print:

And sent it to print. I print nearly everything on some sort of MATTE photo paper. I don't like to tango with fingerprints. They annoy me. Today's brand is Epson - it was on sale at Target awhile back so I bought a few boxes.

Ok. Once I trimmed it out and rounded the top corners with a corner punch by EK Success - I just adhered it right onto the corresponding page waiting for me in the album. Voila!

The next thing I did was open BOTH the Photoshop document with the 3.5 x 2.5 boxes that I made last week - so I can "clip" in any/all of my portrait oriented shots for the page protectors. I'll be filling two of these grids per day - 12 photos total.

And the large pictorial layout sheets I formatted with Ali's The Story Of Today Overlays and have already printed out for each day. This is Monday's...

Now all I have to do is go to my iPhoto library and pull up Monday's shots and just start dragging them and dropping them either onto the large blank sheet - where I'll arrange them into a photo collage - or onto the grid layout where I'll print and trim and tuck inside the baseball card slots.

I'll do this for Monday... then print. Then Tuesday... then print... and so on.

Here's what they look like:

*Note: The only additional step I did was to add an overlay or two. I used these:

Ali's April Photo Overlays

Ali's Days & Months Title + Journal Photo Overlays

Ali's The Story Word Art + Hand Drawn Brushes

Ali's All About Me Hand Drawn Brushes + Stamps

In nearly every instance I would change the .png file to white using the "fill" command in PS - then just drag it right over top of the picture I wanted it to appear on, and scale it down to size. Presto.

Also, for all of you Photoshop Elements users out there - every last step of what I've done for this project is totally do-able in PSE. I just learned so long ago on Photoshop, so it's what I'm used to. Old dog I guess.

Better go now. I really want to put all the finishing touches on this tonight so I can send it to work with Clark tomorrow. He's got a MEGA scanner in his office and kindly does my bidding for me when I'm extra nice to him and cook him tasty grub.

Stay tuned to see the completed album tomorrow!

Comments

[BETH INGHAM]

Wow! When do you sleep? Fantastic!