My youngest, Becky, has been bugging me to bake these lemon cookies from a recipe we found in the newspaper last week, so this morning we got BUSY! (recipe below) But I ALSO had an AH-HA photo moment!!

I wanted to take a photo of Bec with her cookies, but it took a couple of tries:

first, I took the photo without a flash - kinda dark, I COULD lighten it in Photoshop, but let’s try with the flash…

WHOA! That blew her out completely - WAY too strong a flash!

Now what I would have LIKED to do is use a fill flash - where the flash goes off but not at full strength - but alas, this camera does not have a fill flash setting. Hmmmm - What if I put my finger over the flash to attenuate it…

OOH - that’s RED! Hmmm… what ELSE do I have that I could cover the flash with to make it not so bright - oh wait! There’s a stack of paper in the printer right here….

THERE WE GO! I just held a piece of paper from my printer up to the flash, and it diffused and deflected the flash! COOL!

So the lesson from this is, you don’t need to know all the fancy settings on your camera to get great results! There’s a great post on Photojojo about how to make a flash diffuser out of a film can - CLICK HERE to see it.

Now go make your OWN cookies - they are YUMMY!

Lemon Cooler Cookies

from USA Today Magazine, May 16, 2008

Ingredients:

1 cup bleached all purpose flour

¾ cups confectionary sugar, divided

1 tsp finely grated lemon zest

1 stick salted butter, softened

¼ tsp. vanilla extract

Directions:

Adjust oven rack to lowe-middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees F.

Mix flour, ¼ cup confectioners sugar, and lemon zest in a medium bowl. Add butter and vanilla; beat until ingredients form into a dough. Drop cookie dough by generous teaspoons onto a parchment or Silpat lined cookie sheet. Bake until cookie bottoms are golden brown, about 15 minutes. Transfer cookies to a wire rack to cool completely.

Place remaining ½ cup confectioner’s sugar in a quart sized zipper-lock bag. Working a dozen at a time, drop the cookies into the sugar and shake to coat.

Cookies can be stored in an airtight tin for up to 1 week.

MAKES ABOUT 2 dozen Per cookie: 67 calories, 1g protein, 8g carbohydrates, 4g fat (2g saturated), 10mg cholesterol, 0g fiber, 27 mg sodium. (WW points= 2 per cookie)

AND - don’t forget to scrap your baking session!

Happy Scrapping!

One of the most confusing things I think is explaining to students how you need to use the UNSHARP MASK filter to SHARPEN an image!  Today I came across a tutorial that explains it so well - better than I could hope to!  Watch this image to see how you can improve a photo…

just amazing!  The PHOTOJOJO blog has this tut today - CLICK HERE to read it.  If you don’t subscribe to this blog, and you use photoshop… you’re missing out!

Now go look for all those photos you thought weren’t sharp enough to use and get busy!

Happy Scrapping!

I wanted to share with you this great layout my friend Beckygtx made! She did this with a kit that I made for crop gifts, and it was given out over several different events, so I though you might like to have the whole thing! I know I’ve been kind of quiet the last few weeks, since I gave up my store at SOTB, but I’m leaving my kits at Digitalscrapn, and have all KINDS of big stuff in the works… so stay tuned!

Enjoy Something’s Fishy!

Happy Scrapping!

Just read this great article about gas prices and wanted to pass it along. (See it here). I know that Jenn and I are feeling the pinch at the pump but mostly we feel it buying food. Luckily we can take all the money Jenn used to spend on papers and spend it on gas and food! Help me out - I’m curious about what you’re paying. Leave a comment with:

+ Cost of a gallon of milk
+ Cost of a dozen eggs
+ Where you are (City, State, Country)

I’ll summarize the data in a later post. And thanks for satisfying my curiosity!

Stan - The DaddyKitty

Bet you didn’t know this but Jenn, the ScrapKitty herself, was one of the key alpha testers of Adobe Photoshop. The team at Adobe was so grateful they actually included her in the credits:

Here’s a close up: (and no, it’s not Photoshopped):

Read the rest of this entry »

Do you know about the Custom Shape Tool in Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements? Lots of digiscrappers and hybrid scrappers do. But did you know you are not stuck with Read the rest of this entry »

The DaddyKitty and all the LittleKitties want to wish our Mom a Happy Mothers Day!

We wish all of you a Happy Mother’s Day too!

Stan, the DaddyKitty and the LittleKitties

Spring is here, summer is near and I’m TRYING to get some kind of order in this house! I need to get my ‘digital home’ in order too, so I thought I’d share a tip for keeping all those credits with your layouts.

This week’s Tip is a workflow tip – something to make your life a little easier while you’re scrapping.

Have you ever posted a layout somewhere and had to open up the layered file to get the names of the fonts? THEN you have to choose your type tool, choose the layer, and see which font you used.

Wanna do it more quickly?
Here’s what I do (WHEN I’m being organized!) **This works for PS and PSE!**

When you make a type layer, double click on the layer name and change it to the name of the font! You can do this for paper and element layers, put the designer/kit in there. NOW when you need to make your credits list, it’s all right there in front of you! Here’s one of mine:

BUT WAIT, there’s MORE!!

Have you ever opened up an old jpg layout and not known the credits? Can’t find or didn’t save the layered file? Have NO IDEA what kit all that stuff came from?

TRY THIS:
While you’re working on your layout, why not attach the credit information to your file, so when you resize and save as a .jpg you can still see all your credits!

While you’re still in the layered file, go to File>File Info and you will see lots of fields to fill in. I put my info in the ‘Description’ or ‘Caption’ field. Fortunately you HAVE all that info on your layers palette, because you renamed the layers with your credits!

Now when you resize and save as a jpg for posting, all that info will be there. Saved my butt more than once! I don’t always save my layered files, and can’t BEGIN to remember where I got some stuff!

XTRA TIP: Fill out the copyright info! This is especially true for you designers! Hit ALT+0169 to get the little © symbol, and when you reopen the file, it will show up like this:

Every time you save, even in a different format, the file info will be saved! Just open the file and look under File Info to get all your credits.

If this saves even one layout from the indignity of anonymity my work here will be done! LOL!

Happy Scrapping! - Jenn

Since DH took a look at Photoshop Express (and came basically to the same conclusions I did) I thought I’d look over some other editing programs that have come my way. Can’t hurt to cast an eye over the fence now and then!

The kind folks over at Scrapbook Max generously sent me a copy of their cute CD to play with, I’m sure in hopes that I’d tell ya’ll to run right out and buy copies for everyone you know! I played around with it, and I’ll have to give it a qualified thumbs up…

SCRAPBOOK MAX Read the rest of this entry »