Lessons

When I look through my albums, I realize that out of all the events and memories I have labored to capture for my family … the largest percentage of my work is devoted to Christmas layouts. I suppose there are many practical reasons for this phenomenon, among them the simple fact that it is a time when the entire family is gathered together under one roof. If truth be told however, I have to admit that I have never outgrown my love of Christmas and the excitement of the season!

When I look at this photo of my two young nieces, trying so very hard to be good that they can’t be anything but bad, I can’t help but stifle a giggle. It seems like it was just yesterday that I was the child who couldn’t sleep due to pent up excitement … or the young mother who couldn’t sleep waiting to see her own children’s faces filled with delight on Christmas morning.

I began the layout by opening a layered .psd template that I had created from a previous design. Layered templates are a terrific time saver during the jam packed holiday season! The basic design was already in place, allowing me to drag Katie Pertiet’s beautiful papers from “Santa Baby” (designerdigitals.com) into the document and “clip” them to the template components by using Photoshop’s clipping mask shortcut CTRL-ALT-G.

The next step was to edit my photo in Adobe Lightroom. My Bamboo Fun tablet is a fabulous tool for photo editing tasks, allowing me to precisely select small areas such as glowing red eyes that I want to apply adjustments to. This particular photo had some lighting issues and needed to have the exposure bumped. I duplicated the photo and changed the duplicate layer mode to “Screen” which brightened the dark shadows, but blew out some of the lighter areas such as the girl’s faces and the fur brims on their hats. The Bamboo Fun made short work of that problem too! I simply selected my eraser tool, setting it to “pen pressure” and was able to reveal the underlying original photo where needed. Thanks to the Wacom tablet, I could vary the intensity of the eraser tool by adjusting the pressure I applied with the pen.

Once my photo was in place on the template I began to add embellishments to the document. I created the “chipboard” circles by drawing out circles with the Bamboo Fun pen and applying various layer styles (such as a beveled, textured edge) to the circles to give them dimension.

With the solid colored chipboard pieces now in place, I created blank layers above each piece and used the Wacom pen to “stamp” Photoshop brushes from Katie Pertiet’s “Holiday Dots No. 1” brush set onto the blank layers.  I choose brush sizes that were slightly larger than the chipboard circles and then CTRL-clicked on the chipboard circle layer itself to set a selection marquee the exact shape and size as the chipboard piece. Switching back to the layer containing the stamped design, I inverted the selection and hit the Delete key…resulting in a stamped design the fit the chipboard circle perfectly.

The addition of a journaling mat element, digital staple and some text … and I was done … in less than 30 minutes, with ample time left to enjoy the season!