I’m working on a slide show for our friends who are celebrating their 20th anniversary tomorrow night - here is the end slide.  I actually used three different fonts to put the word art together - and it can be a REAL pain to choose fonts.  I’m the kind of person who needs to SEE the type in the font before I can choose, so I have a quick, easy way to do that!

1. Type your text in any font you have handy.

2. Change to the move tool (hit V) and click on the type layer you want to choose a font for.

3. Change back to the type tool (hit T) and go up to the tool options bar - click on the name of the font - it will highlight blue.

4. Use your arrow up or down keys to move through the list of fonts.  When you change the font in the tool options bar, you will see the font on your layout change too!  That way you can see JUST how it will look on your layout, and know what you’re getting!

And just for a little gift - CLICK HERE for the word art!

Happy Scrapping!

Jenn

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!

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

Oh admit it!  You have your favorites… well maybe you love all your KIDS the same, but I KNOW you have favorite kits or folders that you go to all the time.  And if you’re like me, you have to click and click to get to them sometimes.  But did you know there’s a shortcut?? (this works in PSCS2/3 and PSE).

Lately I’ve been really obsessed with working more efficiently.  Maybe the weather is so nice I don’t want to be stuck at the computer, or I’m just trying to cram too much into 24 hours… but I’m much more alert to things that speed up  my workflow.

So here’s one way to speed things up: the FAVORITES folder in the OPEN dialog box!  (The WHAT?? in WHERE??)

Go to File>Open and you will get a dialog box that looks like this:

Navigate to the folder you want to add to your favorites.

Click on the little folder icon with an asterisk in it at the top right (circled above).

You will get a little menu, click on Add Favorite.

TADA - there you go!  Next time you want to go there, just go to File>Open (or hold CTRL and press the letter O)  and click on that little file folder again.  Below the menu choices, you will see your favorite files listed!  Just click on the one you want.

if you decide you no longer need this folder in your favorites list, removing it is easy!

CTRL+O to get the Open dialog, Click on the favorites folder icon (folder with the asterisk in it) and click on Remove Favorite.  You will get a drop down menu listing all your favorites.

Just click on the one you want to remove, and click Remove.

Just THINK of all the things you could put in there!  Your templates file, your design tools, your layouts folder, the kit you’re currently enamored with!

OK, go get yourself all set up and…

Happy Scrapping!

Jenn

Ok, FINALLY, I got all my tutorials together in one place for you!  I’ve written some of these for classes, some for my Tricks of the Trade Challenge at SOTB   - but I put them all on one page HERE for you!  You might want to bookmark this, as I’ll update it when I have new tuts.  I’m working on tuts for the Patch and Healing Brush tools right now!

The newest one has several good things in it - all the neat shortcuts I used to make this page:

If you’ve already done a lot of my challenges, skip the whole list and get my newest tut HERE

And just to make things a little easier - CLICK HERE to download the grid and a layered file that were used for this layout!

Do let me know what tutorials you would like to see me add to the list - I’m always looking for good tut ideas!

Happy Scrapping!

I was roaming around (avoiding work) on the internet today, and found these great field guides for digital SLR users.

CLICK HERE to go to PhotoAnswersOnline

They’re very well done, so scroll to the bottom of the post and DL the whole set of them in one zip.  There is a lot of information in there that we give people when we teach camera classes, and you’ll have it at your fingertips when you need it.   In particular, read through the first one, Using your Digital SLR.  There is lots of good basic information in there that will make you a better photographer!

Happy SNAPping!!

Aren’t digital cameras great? I got serious about photography when I was a teenager back in the dark ages of the 1970’s. Then I had my trusty Kodak Instamatic camera and photographed everything I could think of in that funny square format. The great thing about it and other film cameras is you had to press the camera against your face to see thru the viewfinder. This forced you to brace your arms in towards your body and hold it to your face - thereby getting sharper pictures.

Not so with a digital camera.

Most people, even if their digital camera has a viewfinder, hold it away from their body so they can see the view screen on the back:

Try it yourself. Go grab a camera - I’ll wait…

See how unsteady it is? It’s hard to hold a camera out like that and hold it still enough to get sharp, clear pictures. To get better results tuck those arms back closer to your body, so at least your elbows are touching your body:

Even better, use the viewfinder (if your camera has one) and use the view screen for taking a look at that great shot after you take it!

Thanks to our top notch model Katie! Until next week - keep scrappin’ and photographing!

Stan - The DaddyKitty

For digiscrappers, the gold standard of image editing programs is Adobe Photoshop. But the price! Retail cost of a basic version of Photoshop CS3 (most current version) is $649 while Elements is only $149. (Street price is a even greater difference - $619 vs. $80-90 although you can get educational discounts.) So do you need the full version of Photoshop?

Luckily for your bank account - probably not. Photoshop Elements offers almost everything Photoshop does. It really comes down to how much of a commitment you want to make. If you are a good old digiscrapper, wanting to fix pictures, move elements around, and put different kits together into layouts, Elements is perfect and inexpensive. If you have an eye to being a designer like the ScrapKitty, then you might want to bite the bullet and get the full version of Photoshop.

Why might you want the full version of Photoshop? Here’s a partial list of reasons and my thoughts:

• Type - Big difference here. Photoshop allows adjusting the kerning (spacing between two individual letters) and tracking (spacing between all letters). It also allows type on a path which is where you can draw any shape of line (curve , circle, oval, rectangle) and have the type follow it automatically.
• Better Selection Tools - Photoshop offers better control over selections with the Magic Selection tool, Refine Edge, Color Range, and the Extract tools. Note that the features are very similar and the tools often leap frog on another - see it in one version and the same better tools shows up latter in the other. But Photoshop still beats out Elements for those tricky ones.
• Layer Styles - Layer styles are quick tools to add snap and zip to a layer. They can add drop shadows, bevels, gradients, etc to plain shapes and type. While Elements comes with a good selection of pre-defined layer styles, you can’t make your own or alter the ones already there. With Photoshop, go wild. You can download layer styles for free from a variety of sources and change them to suit your needs or just create your own. Your creativity is your only limit! Photoshop is the hands-down winner here.
• Quick Mask Mode - While Elements has a watered down, harder to use version, the quick mask mode in Photoshop is superior and one of the most under appreciated tools in Photoshop. It allows you to “paint” a selection by using the paint brush. It allows much greater control over a selection of tricky areas like jagged edges, hair, etc. You can also quickly switch in and out of quick mask mode to check your work - can’t do that in Elements.
• Custom Brushes - While you can create you own brushes in Elements, you have greater control and options in Photoshop. I can guarantee almost any brush you might download or buy is done in Photoshop. And as brushes are an essential tool to digiscrappers, again Photoshop gets the nod.
• Actions - Actions are steps that you do over and over that you can automate and run with one click. Some actions are incredibly complex (see Clohie Watkins Bow actions or any of the actions at Atomic Cupcake.) It’s easy once you know a few basics to create your own but you can only do it in Photoshop. Elements can run actions made in Photoshop but you can not create your own actions in Elements (and it can be tricky to install actions in Elements).

I hope this shed a little light on this. If you need training on either Photoshop or Elements, look on the blog for the ScrapKitty’s classes forming in January. Our classes are 4 sessions of interactive chat as well as ample written workbooks giving you the training you need to get good using either program. We’ve taught these classes before and our students always find them useful and focus on just the features you need to know.

As always, you can contact me by clicking here. Happy Scrappin!

You might have noticed the ShareThis button () at the bottom of our posts and pages. This allows you to quickly email a post OR submit a post to one of the social bookmark and networking sites like facebook, myspace, digg, stumbleupon, etc. Just give it a click and try it!
Why add it? Two reasons:

• It makes it easier for YOU to share a post or page with a friend and fellow digiscrapper

• It allows us a quick and easy tool to provide these links for you (it’s a bear to have to add the code for each site manually - this does it all in one!)

Please give it a try! Email a post to a friend or submit us to stumbleupon or digg or any other of your choice. (We like stumbleupon and digg. Don’t know what they are or what this whole social media stuff is about? Click here and here for some funny and simple video explanations.)

In my last post I touched briefly on optical zoom as being a more important consideration when looking for a new digital camera than resolution. After a few questions and comments, I thought I would discuss this important feature of your digital camera.

Okay - everybody knows what zoom is - the ability to enlarge what you are seeing in your digital camera to make it seem like you are closer to your subject. Whether you zoom in because you physically can’t get closer to your subject or you just don’t want to walk closer, zooms are great for digiscrappers to get a perfect shot - one that fills your picture with good detail of what you are photographing without having a lot of useless stuff to crop out.
Here’s the critical part - There are two ways to make a camera zoom. Build a lens (optical zoom) into the camera that increase the magnification (this adds cost and weight) or write software that crops the picture (digital zoom). Digital zoom takes an part of the picture and blows it up to the original size - thereby dropping the quality significantly. It can make the picture blurry and pixelated (blocky looking). It’s just like you taking a picture in Photoshop Elements or Photoshop and cropping it - but the camera does it behind your back!

Here’s an example: Jenn took this picture of my eye; first by moving close and just using the optical zoom and then moving further away and zooming to get the same picture. Look how bad the quality gets using that digital zoom:

The sad part is some digital camera manufacturers are playing a numbers game - combining the optical zoom and digital zoom to get a high zoom number. For example our old digital camera was a 12x zoom - that’s pretty good! However, it was 3x optical and 4x digital (3 x 4 to get the 12). It really only zoomed up 3x before the quality started dropping off a lot. Sometimes you have to really search the camera’s info to find these numbers too.

So how much should you get? A 3x optical zoom seems to be pretty standard on most cameras; 4x is better. Our current camera (Canon Powershot S3 IS) is a 12x optical 48x total zoom. And that 12x is nice! Remember too that it is always best to move closer to your subject if you can as the more you zoom the steadier you have to hold the camera.

Just remember to always look for the optical zoom number and you’ll get good, quality pictures to share with friends and family!

Happy Scrapping and A great holiday!

Stan, The DaddyKitty