2007 October | Scraps Of Mind

Archive for October, 2007

Posted by karooch on

October 25, 2007

Create Scrapbook Backgrounds from your Photos

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Have you ever had a photo of a special moment that you really really want to scrap but the photo is blurry and of poor quality, and just not good enough to feature on a scrapbook layout? Well why not turn it into a scrapbook layout background?

Last May my brother and his wife celebrated their Silver Wedding Anniversary. They have just been through two anni horribili (thanks for the phrase, Your Maj) which seriously tested their marriage, their sanity and their entire family’s lives. So this special event was an even more poignant one for them. They threw a party, inviting all the people who had been involved in some way in helping them get through the past two years. You can imagine how special we all felt to be there. And to top it off, they announced at the party that they would be renewing their marriage vows later that evening, and in fact we had really all been invited to their Wedding. Then they disappeared, got changed, and all of us parted to make an aisle for my sister-in-law’s father to lead her to my brother who was waiting at the end with the marriage celebrant.

It was a wonderful and teary moment

…and I fluffed the photos.

My camera wasn’t on the right setting. I was far from calm and unemotional. The place was crowded. Whatever the excuse, the photos were out of focus, blurry, dreadful!

I spent an afternoon fiddling around with them in Photoshop Elements, trying to bring them up to some level of quality that I could scrap but to no avail.

Then I hit on the idea of turning one of my blurry photos into a background. Here’s how I did it:

* First I dragged the photo to make it large enough to fill the background of my layout. You could choose to only fill a part of your layout if you wish.

* The quality of the photo degraded even further but for this technique that doesn’t really matter. If you have concerns about this however, you can follow the steps in my Upsizing Your Photos tutorial to increase the size of your photo with a minimum of degradation.

* I then changed the blending mode in the Layers Pallet (drop down menu box, top left on the Layers Pallet) to Overlay.

* I dragged a few background papers from my stash, positioning them behind the photo by dragging the layer down the layer stack (in the Layers Pallet) to sit below the photo layer. I ended up choosing a lovely soft background paper from the Bella Collection by Thao Cosgrove.

* With the remaining photos, I chose a couple that defined the occasion, reduced them to fit in the filmstrip frame, and turned them to black and white (Enhance>Image Color>Remove Color). This is another good technique when you have dodgy photos. Monochrome is so much more forgiving than colour.

* A title and couple of accents to pull it all together (you might note my favourite Visual Triangle technique with the pink flowers), and I had created a layout from photos that I had considered were beyond hope.

You might like to try this yourself when faced with those out of focus photos that we all end up with from time to time. You don’t even need to wait for poor quality photos to try it out. I think it’s a pretty good look to use with any photos.

And for those who enjoy Hybrid Scrapbooking, it looks great when you add some ‘real life’ embellishments to make the collage at the corner of the film strip.

How did you Get into Scrapbooking?

Over the last month I’ve taken many of you on my ScrapBlogging Journey: a saga in four parts. In Part Two I described how I first got involved in scrapbooking when I was frustrated by having the memories of a trip to France scattered across different media (Photo CD, trip diary CD and accumulated memorabilia). How it really bugged me that I couldn’t enjoy them all together. And then how I saw a scrapbooking magazine at a friend’s place which totally excited and inspired me so that I rushed home and compiled my first album over the next two weeks.

Well I was thinking about that turning point which had such a significant impact on my life. And I wondered how you guys started your scrapbooking journey. Did it hit you like a bolt from the blue, similar to my experience? Did it sneak up on you until you found yourself addicted to it without realising it? Or maybe Scrapbooking is something you’ve done since you were a kid; having been exposed to it by your Mother.

What’s your Scrapbooking story? I bet we’d all like to hear about the different paths that each of us have traveled to become Scrapbookers. Let’s share the lowdown in this post. Come on, let’s hear your Scrapbooking Story.

Scrapbooking Tips & Techniques - Transforming Perspective in Photos

Have you ever taken a photo of a tall building or object from fairly close by? So you’re looking up at it.

The laws of perspective kick in and you find that the top of the building or object is narrower than the base because it is so much further away from your camera.

Now if that’s not the effect you want. If you want your object to look perfectly even all the way up, as if you were taking the photo from a point further away there is a way you can use your photo editing software to give you the effect you want.

As always, these instructions are for Photoshop Elements 4 as that is my weapon of choice. But the principles hold true for whatever scrapbooking software you use and only the names of the functions may be different and the location of them in your toolbar or menu.

I have used this example of an ancient Greek column just because I had it, but this technique works even better with a tall building as the subject.

Open your photo in your editing software.
Create a duplicate layer by highlighting the layer to be duplicated and dragging it up to the New Layer icon at the top left of the Layers Pallet (or highlight the layer in your Layers Pallet and choose Layer>Duplicate Layer from the top menu bar). When making any changes you should always work on a copy. Never on the original.
Using the Rectangle Selection Tool in your Toolbar create a selection by dragging it over the whole of your photo.
In the Menu Bar, open Image>Transform>Perspective.
‘Handles’ will now appear at the sides and corners of your selection.
Drag the top left and right handles horizontally outwards. The top of your photo will stretch. When the vertical sides of your subject are perpendicular stop stretching the photo.
You can stretch the photo back and forth until it looks the way you want it to. Then just press Enter, and your photo has been transformed.

You can have fun with all sorts of things with the Transform tool and do some pretty bizarre things to your photos if you want. It can be a great scrapbooking creativity tool.

I hope you like this tip and will find it useful. Let me know how you go. And even better put one of your transformed photos up on your blog.

Earn some money with your blog

Most of us would like it if our blogs could earn us a few extra bucks without us having to make any effort, wouldn’t we? Some money to help fund our tragic (?) Scrapbooking Addiction at least.

Well there is actually an easy way to do this. And it’s not only legal but totally painless as well.

Text Link Ads is a broker of text links (duh!!) which means they they have clients who want to seed links to their sites around the blogosphere and will pay you a monthly fee to host these links on your site.

Now we’re not talking spam sites here. I hope you know me better than to think I would suggest anyone gets into that murky area. And we’re not talking X rated sites either. Generally the reason sites do this is because they want to increase the popularity of their site in Google through having other sites linking to them. And also they’ll be hoping for some extra traffic that way as a bonus. This is how it works.

For the last couple of months I’ve hosted a couple of links from Text Link Ads on Scraps of Mind. sitting in a text box with no heading in my sidebar. A couple of harmless and rather boring sites and a Scrapbook Supply Sellers blog. However they pop a nice little handful of dollars per month into my PayPal Account without me having to do anything.

I simply registered Scraps of Mind as a publisher with Text Link Ads, copied a piece of code into one of my text widgets and they went out and found the links and populated the widget with them. Then each month they send me the ‘rent’ with no effort from myself.

You can nominate to approve the links before they get put on your site to ensure that you don’t host anything that is against your principles. They’ll send you an email to let you know they have sold new inventory on your site and if you don’t respond after 24 hours after that email then they will assume silence is consent.

So if you’d like to pop a few bucks into your PayPal account to help offset your online scrapbook purchases, this might be just the thing for you.

If you want to find out more about Text Link Ads click here