Quick Tip Tuesday – Easy Peasy Photo Mats

One of the most basic techniques that comes to digital scrapbooking from the paper-scrap world is matting photos.  With paper, it’s simple.  Glue your photo down onto some pretty paper, then cut the paper so that it shows a little beyond the edges of the photo.

In the digi-world, it’s not hard to do either!

Here’s a quick and easy way to put mats under your photos – the digital way:

Step 1: Pick out a background paper and a photo. Drag the photo onto the paper, making sure that there’s room all around it for the mat.

Step 2: Pick out the paper you want to use for the mat, and open it.

Step 3: Choose the Move tool, and hold down the SHIFT key.  Now click and drag the mat paper onto the background paper.  Holding the SHIFT key will make the mat paper land exactly in the center of the background paper, covering the whole thing. If you can’t see your photo at this point, hold the CTRL key and press the [ key until the mat paper is on the layer below your photo).

Step 4: Choose the Marquee tool, making sure you have the Rectangular Marquee tool.  (If the Elliptical tool is showing, click on it and hold the mouse button down until you see the Rectangular Marquee tool, then click on it to Choose it.)  Click and drag a selection around the photo, leaving as much space as you like around the photo.

Right-click inside the selection, and choose Select Inverse.

Press Delete, and the rest of the paper except for the part right under and immediately around the photo will disappear!

Step 5: To keep the mat under the photo as you move it around, you want to link the mat layer and the photo layer.  To do this, hold the CTRL key down and click on both layers in the layers panel to make them both active (they will highlight).  Now click on the Link Layers symbol at the bottom (or top if you have PSE) of the layers panel– it looks like a little chain.

When you do this, it’ll put a chain symbol on both layers, showing you they are linked.  If you move one layer, the other will move too!  To unlink them, just click on one of the layers to make it active and click on the Link Layers symbol again.

You can repeat this process as many times as you want!  It’s quick, easy, and you don’t have to try to guess how large to ‘cut out’ your paper, or stretch it to fit after the fact!

Happy Scrapping!
Jenn

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