Shout out to all the newbies or digi scrap wannabes!! My friend, Sarah, requested a “creating your first layout” tutorial and I thought that was a fabulous idea! I couldn’t find a good tutorial when I first started, so I hope I can help you out with that. I know I have a few visitors who want to do digital scrapbooking, but just don’t know where to start. You seasoned scrappers, feel free to pass this along to friends who are just getting started.

So, before we can do anything, you need a program. I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 5. Adobe has since come out with Elements 7 and I’m not sure what would be different between my version and yours, but I’m sure the basics are the same. You can download a free trial version of PSE 7 here. I highly recommend PSE. It is affordable and user-friendly, but has a lot of capabilities once you get more advanced. I personally would like to get Photoshop CS3… it is very expensive and rather complicated.

Next, we need a digital kit! Before you go buy anything, go pick up a few free kits. Then once you’re sure you want to do this, go spend to your heart’s content. There are some awesome freebies out there… but don’t go crazy and download every free thing you can find. I did that when I first started and it really wasn’t quality stuff so I later deleted thousands of files from my computer. There are three places with some awesome free kits: Peppermint Creative, GG Digital Designs, and Shabby Princess. Peppermint Creative and GG Digital Designs both have very frequent freebies (nearly every month) and free kits are released sporadically at Shabby Princess.

Organizing your files is a whole article in itself, so I’m not going to get into that here. All digital goodies come zipped in zip files. You need to extract them to get to your files. With Windows Vista, I just right click on the zip file and select Extract. You can delete the zip file when you’ve extracted the kit. There is no need to keep it.

Now let’s open up PSE. Here is a screen shot with labels to help you know what I am referring to during this tutorial. *NOTE: ALL SCREENSHOTS ARE CLICKABLE SO YOU CAN GET A BETTER LOOK.

So, I’ve opened up the PSE Editor. This is where we will create our layout. I have dragged and dropped some items from a kit (I am using Robin Carlton and MandaBean’s Stop! Jammer Time from Sweet Shoppe Designs) from Windows Explorer or my PSE Organizer into the photo bin in the PSE Editor (see above image). Now I need a blank canvas to work on. I hit CTRL+N to open a new canvas, but you can also go to File - New. Make sure you set your canvas to 12 x 12 inches and at 300 ppi (this is equivalent to 3600×3600 pixels) with a transparent background in RGB Color. Even if you plan on printing at 8×8, scrap at 12×12 because you can later resize down but it’s never a good idea to resize up by too much.

You should now have a canvas that looks like this:

Now I am going to start creating my page. In PSE 5, I am able to drag papers and elements from my photo bin onto my 12×12 canvas in the main window. In PSE 6 you can’t do that. For PSE 6 you must open the paper or element you want to add to your layout on your main screen, then drag from that canvas onto the thumbnail of your 12×12 page in the photo bin. PSE 5 is capable of doing both these methods, but I am unsure about PSE 7. I am starting with a background paper.

Next, I added my photo using the same drag and drop method. Notice that every time you add something new to your page, it is on its own layer as you can see in the layers palette. You can move and manipulate each layer on its own without affecting other layers.

Now I start adding elements. When you want to send a layer backwards or forwards you can click on Arrange on the top of the Editor as highlighted in this screenshot, or you can drag layers in the layers palette, or you can do what I do and use these keyboard shortcuts: CTRL+[ to send backward, CTRL+SHIFT+[ to send to back, CTRL+] to send forward, CTRL+SHIFT+] to send to front.

To resize an element, select the layer and then click and drag the corners in or out. A major pet peeve of mine is when someone doesn’t constrain proportions and the element gets skewed. Most of the time, as long as I’m resizing using the corners, PSE will constrain proportions…but sometimes it doesn’t. Make sure that when you are resizing that the Constrain Proportions box is checked along the top toolbar.

Now I want to add some journaling. I select the Text tool in the left-hand toolbar. Then click and drag to create a text box. Type in your journaling. You can change the font and color along the top of your toolbar.

My last step is to add shadows. Without shadows, the page looks very flat. See this tutorial for help with PSE’s shadow styles.

And now all that’s left to do is save! Go to File - Save (or hit CTRL+S) and save it as a layered .PSD file. I personally save my layered files as .TIF files because they are much smaller than .PSD files, but I’m not going to get into that here. That will be a future article.
You can later open up this layered file and manipulate it, or you can save a copy of it as a JPEG for printing or for posting online. To create a web size version suitable for online posting in a gallery, go to File - Save For Web and resize to 500×500 or 600×600 pixels and drag the quality slider down until the file size is below 150 kb (the max file size allowed on most galleries).

Do not save any changes you may make to your scrap supplies while making your layout so you cna use them again in the future.

I think that’s it. If you have questions, feel free to leave me a comment. I can edit this post if you have some suggestions that might help strengthen the tutorial. HAPPY SCRAPPING! And beware: Digital scrapbooking is HIGHLY ADDICTIVE!