Hi, I’m Leslie and I’m a guest Creative Team member for Chelle’s Creations this month.  I can’t tell you how exciting it’s been to be a part of such a great group of women, getting to know them and Chelle, and getting lots of pages done for my digital scrapbook in the process using great Chelle’s Creations kits!  And for her readers, I have a little freebie cluster at the bottom.
I use Creative Memories’ Storybook Creator Plus (SBC+) for my scrapbooking in addition to Photoshop Elements (PSE).  For those of you with PSE, you have lots and lots of templates out there that you can use that are already in Photoshop format.  SBC+ uses a propitiatory file type, and we have to do a little bit of work to get png and jpg files into our program to use as templates*.
I work behind the scenes making page files for another designer on Scrap Orchard, and as such have made many many page files from pngs.  I hope that my work flow can help others who use SBC+ make their own pages.  These directions will be shown on SBC3.0, but the same workflow works in 4.0, with a few steps made easier, which I’ll explain.  I’ll be using Chelle’s Askew Templates which can be found here Chelle’s Askew Templates
First, I open a project that’s the same size as the Photoshop template, which is usually 12×12.  Whether you do this as part of a Storybook or as a Page Print doesn’t matter.
Then, I go to the right hand side and select “Photos” and then “Get Photos”.

I navigate to where the PNG folder is and get all the photos.

So now, they’re all in the program stored under photos.  Then, I start at the bottom of the stack and work up inserting things into the page. Go to the last photo in the list and double click on it.  That will bring in that photo to the bottom layer.  Then go to Arrange–>Flatten and flatten the image (if the layer is, as shown, filling up the whole screen, you don’t have to flatten it and then you can fill it like you would a photo holder).

Work your way up the layer stack, inserting images into your project and flattening them.
When you’re done bringing in all the photos and flattening them, you can remove those photos from the photos list.

Now, this is where you can feel free to stop, because you have a working template right now.   But I often take it a few steps further in the templates I make.  I prefer to have as many shapes as possible allow me to drop photos or papers right into them and then easily resize the photos and papers.  If the template shapes are rectangles, that’s easy–insert a photo holder, and use the resizing elements to make it in the same place and the same size as the PNG files you’ve brought in.  To get it in the same place in the layer stack, select the photo holder you made and then select the PNG file you inserted earlier.  Now group those two things together (Arrange–>Group) That will bring the photo holder down to the same place as the PNG file.  Then Arrange–>Ungroup.  Now you can delete the PNG file (it will be the bottom of the two and will also be the one that doesn’t have the yellow arrows in it when you select it.  I like to fill my photo holders with colors so they’re not all gray, especially if the intention is to fill them with paper.  SBC4.0 makes this a bit simpler than 3.0–you can just fill it with color right away.  But with SBC3.0, you have to first fill that photo holder with a photo or paper and THEN you can fill that same photo holder with a color.
For wonky shapes, like the ones in Chelle’s template I used as an example, it’s a bit more advanced than the scope of this tutorial can get into.  But what I do do is make custom shapes for each of the askew shapes and before inserting the shapes into my project, I say, “Save this shape as content”.  I now can insert a photo holder and use the Mat function to shape the photo holder like my custom shape.  I do this for all the shapes on the page, and voila, a template you can use again and again!
I hope you’ve learned a little something here and if you have questions, make comments on the blog.  But in the meantime, enjoy this little Christmas freebie I made for you! A little return address label sized for Avery labels 5155. Just add the text as needed for your family in your favorite scrapbooking program and save it to a JPG and then use it in your favorite word processing program formatted for Avery Labels 5155. Just right click on the image and save to your computer. It’s full size right here!


2 Comments

  1. Stella

    Thanks! That was very helpful to me! And, thanks for the Avery label freebie – a unique and useful gift, for sure!

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