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There are so many time saving tips and shortcuts in both Photoshop and Elements that it’s hard to remember them all. Here’s one I knew and had forgotten:

Here’s some nice journaling I pulled from one of Jenn’s layouts -

To easily select just one word, select your text tool (keyboard shortcut “T”) and double-click on the word. And just that word is selected.

To select a line of text, triple-click on any word in the line. Easy!

To select the entire paragraph, quadruple-click any word and the whole paragraph is selected.

Using any of these tips is a lot easier than trying to select at exactly the point you want and trying to click and drag to select the word or lines you need. Give it a try!

Till next time - Keep Scrappin’

Stan

(type picture courtesy of a Creative Commons license)

Remember Photo Booths? Those magical machines in Five and Dime stores where you sat on the funny hard bench and showed your true self in 4 quick photos. I remember so distinctly the one at our local Woolworth store. My mom, being the practical German that she is, would never allow us to waste our money on a photo booth. So it was a special treat to get to junior high and have a little of my own money to sit down and capture myself and friends in those 4 photos.

We recently went to Dollywood, a local amusement park in Pigeon Forge, TN with our dear friends the Myers. Dollywood has the modern day equivalent to the old chemical-based photo booth - a digital one. Check out some of the neat pictures we took:

There is even a site devoted to the old time chemical-based booths at Photobooth.net and Flickr has a bunch of groups and images.

If you have any, please post them in our gallery and share with everyone!

Till next time - Keep Snappin’

Stan

(Photo Booth picture courtesy of Creative Commons license)

Believe it or not, it’s the world’s first digital camera. It was invented by Steve Sasson at Eastman Kodak (my old company) in 1975. Steve and his chief lab technician took the first digital camera picture in December using their lab assistant as a model. It took 23 seconds to capture the picture and an additional 23 seconds to read off of the cassette tape to a TV to view it. The camera is a whopping .01 megapixel (only 10,200 pixels) and was black and white.

We’ve come a long way since then!

Thanks to Steve Sasson and the vision of the researchers at Kodak to bring us to where we are today.

To learn more about Steve see his blog at Kodak and a Wikipdeia entry.

Stan

Found some GREAT old photos last night, looking at the books with our DD Becky, and decided to make a ‘then and now’ layout for the book I’m working on.  As usual, I was short on time, and wanted to do this quickly!  So…

I was browsing my layouts folder for inspiration, and found this layout:

and I thought it would work with my photos - so I dug up the layered file, swapped out the photos and paper, and had a 5 minute layout that I love!

So - today’s tip is a scrapping tip AND a Photoshop tip…

SCRAP TIP - if you need a quick layout, choose another layout you love, swap out the photos, and papers and elements too if you want, and TADAAA!

PS/PSE TIP - The way I do this quickly, is just choose the layer I’m replacing, (say, a photo layer) then drag the new photo onto the layout.  It will automatically make a new layer just above the old one.  Then I can use a clipping mask and resize it if necessary to make it fit the old layer  (to clip, hover your cursor on the line between the two layers, then hold the ALT key and click!)

Once you do this for all the things you want to change, you can click on the eye to the left of the layer thumbnail to turn off the journaling, and make a new type layer with new journaling.

When you have the layout the way you want it, just SaveAs… a new name!  Save as a .jpg for printing, then save the original file with the new layers in case you need to change something.

Hope this inspires you to revisit and revamp some of your favorite pages!!

Happy Scrapping!

Jenn

DigitalScrapbookingMagazine

I know I’ve been out of the loop, but I just heard about the demise of Digital Scrapbooking Magazine.  CLICK HERE to read the announcement from CK.

I don’t know how I feel about this - I liked having a print magazine I could read on my lunch break at work, sometimes a digimag just isn’t the same.  BUT - I don’t know how much I really liked the mag.  I thought the content was kind of thin.  Anyone else subscribe?  What do you think, is this a loss to the digiscrap community?  What mags do you read, online or off?

We’re home from New York, and want to thank you all for your kind thoughts and comments on Stan’s dad’s passing.  It was as good an experience as can be expected - Stan had some time with his father to say goodbye, we had a lovely memorial service, got to see lots of family and friends.  The trip was arduous though, and we’re glad to be home.

Go hug your family, tell your parents you love them, and have a great weekend!

Jenn and I are not working on the blog for the next few days due to the passing of my dad. He was a great dad, grandfather and husband and we all miss him! I’m going to scrap something about him soon.

Stan

click to see larger image

I just love the journaling on this layout from my digibuddy Marlie!  She did this all herself, just picked key works and gussied them up!  You could use tags, little pieces of ribbon, scraps of paper or cardboard… so many ideas!!  To see Marlie’s layout up close and leave her some love, CLICK HERE

Do you have an unusual way to make your journaling part of the art?  Show us in the gallery, and leave a link in the comments!

As Jenn and I watch our 401(k) decrease daily it makes one wonder how the heck we got here? Here’s Paddy Hirsch, Senior Editor at American Public Media’s Marketplace blog, with a great analogy that even I understood.

The credit crisis as Antarctic expedition from Marketplace on Vimeo.

For more videos and information visit their website.

Leave a comment here and let me know if you found this useful.

Keep Scrappin’

Stan

Disco Inferno!!  (sorry, but you gotta follow burn baby burn with disco inferno! - I know, showing my age…)

I read a great little tut today on Scrapper’s Guide on Ribbon Wrapping:

http://scrappersguide.com/tip_sg_08-10-20el.html

but I feel like she left one more step off the tut…

I got through the steps she wrote -

cut a piece of ribbon just a teeny bit wider than what you’re wrapping it around (hint, it should be wider by how THICK you feel the ribbon is - felt would be thicker than satin ribbon),

round over the corners with the eraser tool,

but then I felt it needed more…

so I took the burn tool:

and set it thus:

and ran it over the edge of the ribbon a few times, until I got this result:

Now look at the two different results:

I think the left (burned) end looks much more realistic!  The width of the burned area should be wider the thicker the item you are wrapping AROUND is.  Play around until you get a look you like.  Burning is a great way to get better dimension on your work!

Now go wrap me something!

See you in the gallery….

Jenn