Editing Digital Scrapbook Paper

Sometimes the colors in paper designs we like don't always match the photos you want to use them with or the mood you are trying to create with your layout. Here is a simple way to alter your paper to fit the project you are working on.

This video today is going to talk about how to modify your digital scrapbook papers that you can download from the website. There’s a lot of great colors and textures available, but sometimes, they just aren’t exactly what you might possibly need for your project that you have in mind.

For example, here is a couple swatches from the Baby Girl Collection. It’s nice subtle pinks and greens and really pastel colors. The textures are great and it would serve purposes for other layouts, not just babies.

So today, I’m going to show you how you can modify that. The photo I’m choosing is a great photo of my kids. I love it, but as you can see, when you put it on the layout, it is really the colors are all wrong for it.

But that’s okay, we can change that. That’s the beauty of digital scrapbook paper, you are not limited to what is on screen. You have a lot of control over how you can choose your colors and how you can modify it.

With that layer selected, it is the base layer on my layout. I am going to go to Image, Adjustments, Hue and Saturation. This is a very important tool for color changing in any Photoshop or Photoshop Element document, so it’s definitely worth playing around with.

You can see under Edit, is Master. If you click on it, there’s reds, yellows, greens, cyans, blues, and magentas. I’m going to keep it on master right now, just to give you an idea of what this will do. If you take the hue slider bar and you move it one way or the other, it’s will completely change the colors of your background.

Now if we move to the left here, it’s showing a lot more purples, which really isn’t the colors we’re after. We want more earthy tones, that is going to look great with the background in the photo and keep the red and blue in the photo popping.

Below that is the saturation. If you move it to the left, it’s will make it a lot more gray. It’s going to take a lot of the color out. But actually, that’s kind of a nice look, more for a masculine layout. Or if you move it far to the right, it will look like fire. See how different the saturation option can do for your colors.

I’m going to move that back to zero. The lighten does what you would expect it to. It will make it lighter or darker. One other thing I’m going to show you is whatever color is in your foreground color, you can actually select Colorize, and it will turn it into a monochromatic color for your entire image or the layer that is selected.

You can do this with photos, paper or pretty much anything. But that’s not what I’m after for this paper. So, I am going to select reds because I’m going to try to get rid of some of the pink in this layout. When I just have the red selected, it will keep the green still visible in your layout in the paper, but it’s really only going to change the red, so we will see that.

A lot of this is really just a matter of playing around with it, seeing what works, and finding just the right color that really looks good. I think I’m going to keep it right about there. I’m also going to make note of it that I’ve changed the red hue to plus 32, because I probably will do that with the other layers.

Saturation, I’m going to move it about the same, to minus 32. I’m going to keep the lightness about minus 12 or 16. See how easy that was?

Now I’m going to click on the next layer with the stripe, and then I’m going to select hue and saturation again. Select my reds. Move my hue to plus 32, my saturation to minus 32, and my lightness to minus 16.

See this bar in the center here, it’s a solid color. I would like to pull in the red from my son’s shirt, and turn that bar to that color. Now, without having to select it, click on the lock button right next to it. Make sure that’s highlighted. And then when you fill it, it’s only going to fill in where the pixels are at on that layer.

So instead of having just a solid bar going across behind this image, I’m going to play around with the layers, and I have decided to try the linear burn. See, it really brings out the darker colors in black, but that’s a little too dark, so I am going to change the opacity just a tad, probably down to about 80 percent.

As you can see, what was a baby girl paper design is now more suitable for the the picture that I’ve chosen for this layout.