Garden Gnome at Home

I've had Adobe® Photoshop® on my computer for quite sometime but up until a few months ago had only used it for resizing images. Talk about not using a program to it's potential. It all started because I wanted to make a custom made blinkie. Then working with the program I quickly saw this had a lot more potential for scrapbooking than the two programs I had. I like that I can customize as I want through my eyes and how the image makes me feel, not to someone else's standard. Over the past few months I've learned a lot about Photoshop® especially through a lot of online tutorials. I would like to make a special mention for Obsidian Dawn. I'm enjoying her brushes and tutorials immensely.

Since our first grandbaby was born in late December, the pictures and video clips have been going back and forth. What I started was a digital scrapbook of her first year but I knew I wanted full control of how it came out. She along with each set of grandparents and her parents will have a printed and CD copy. I plan to make CD copies for anyone who asks. But I want the scrapbook to look like a traditional paper scrapbook when printed. This is where Photoshop® really will be an asset. The main rule for printing these types of pages is to use a high quality, brilliant white photo paper. I find for scrapbooking that matt works nicely when printing a full layout. This will cost a bit more than regular paper but the detail and colours are crisper. The amount you will save in not having to buy embellishments like ribbon, vellum, brads, stickers and ect. will more than cover the cost for the paper.

I made the image for this post using Photoshop®, layers and different brushes in about 10 minutes. I started with layers right off the bat while learning how to do simple animations. Then I started playing with layers using digital photographs I take. Once I got the hang of working with layers, I found there were so many things I could do. I use layers for most of the images on my blogs now. So if you have Photoshop® and haven't explored the possibilities, check out some of the online resources in the links section. You will be amazed at what this program is capable of doing!

Have a great day,

Garden Gnome
© 2007