Lessons

As the seasons change, we all do a little dreaming and anticipating.  The scrapbook layouts in our family albums should not just reflect what we’ve already done, but what our imaginations have designed for our future.

Digital Scrapbook Place designer Nicole Young created the following layout using a variety of elements from her Storybook Dreams Kit, which we are providing for your use.  Nicole also used elements from her Love is in the Air series and her Midnight in the Garden series.  Her Wacom tablet enabled her to design layer masks with detailed blending; creating a soft, dreamy look.

To develop the overall feel of her layout, in Adobe Photoshop she first placed a background and “floor” from the storybook Dreams Kit, and then added a variety of elements to frame the page. She positioned the title: Imagination Never Stops and set the blend mode to soft light at 100%.  This wasn’t dark enough, so she duplicated the layer and set the second layer to 50% opacity (also at the soft light blend mode).

Nicole then cropped a photo of her son to fit the small window frame in the upper left corner.

Then she extracted a separate photo of her son using masks.  First she added the full photo to the page.

She then went to Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All.

Then using a soft brush at a large size, she painted the mask with black at 100% opacity.  This is great with the pen tool, because it is sensitive to how much pressure you put on the pen and you have much more control than if you used a mouse. She painted around her son, leaving an edge that required a smaller brush to mask.

She then changed her brush setting to a smaller size to get a little closer to his body.

Again changing her brush to a smaller size and a lower opacity, she masked out to the very edge of his body, fully extracting him from the original background.  Using her tablet’s pen tool allowed Nicole to get into all those natural bends and creases of her son’s body, removing him from the photo without any artificially straight lines or angles that a mouse sometimes leaves behind.

You can also add more elements or a shadow to add a realistic flair to your extraction.  As you can see in the finished layout above, Nicole gave her son a fishing pole to “hold” which truly placed him in this fantasy scene she had created for him.

Digital Scrapbook Place invites you to use your tablet to brush away the boundaries of your imagination!  Check out our Tutorial page for more tablet techniques and create your own page about dreams and wishes.  What do you hope for in your future?  What are your children dreaming about that fills them with excitement?  Let Nicole Young’s Storybook Dreams Kit help you explore and visualize those wishes.  We can’t wait to see your pages!