Several of the latest Album Paks have featured the use of Frame Clusters. You can find them in the Growth Spurts Album Pak, Painted Tapestry Album Pak, and this month's featured album, Birthday Blast Album Pak.

These albums, with the frames and titles separate from the embellished backgrounds, give you many options to create a multitude of great layouts in minutes. Once you have chosen a photo(s) you would like to scrapbook, pick out a Quick Page Template background that coordinates, like Trish did above.

Feel free to rotate the background if it helps to create a more cohesive layout. Then choose the frame you would like to use and open the file. Shown at right is the Frame Flowers available with the Birthday Blast Album Pak.

There are several ways to add your photo to the frame. The simplest is to drag the photo beneath the frame, and size to the correct size.

Open your photo and perform any editing you desire. Copy or drag the photo onto the open frame file. Drag the photo layer under the frame layer in the layer palette, and resize to fit inside the frame with the Move Tool. Don't worry if a little is overhanging the edges, we will fix that.

In Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, there are three types of selection tools to choose from the flyout menu, when you hover your mouse over the Selection Tool in the Toolbar.

1. The Lasso Tool is one to use if you are comfortable drawing freehand.

2. The Polygonal Lasso Tool will create straight lines easily.

3. The Magnetic Tool traces along color and brightness pixel changes and wouldn't be useful for our purposes. I personally prefer the Polygonal Tool.

Using the Polygonal Lasso tool, draw along the edges of the frame by clicking at the corners as you draw along, to anchor the points. Once you have completed your selection (by having the last point match the first point like in a dot-to-dot puzzle) you will see a blinking line called "marching ants". Double check that you have the photo layer selected in the layer palette. Click Select>Invert, then Edit>Cut to delete the extraneous outer edges. This should delete all the unwanted portions of the photo. Merge your layers and copy to your background paper/layout file.

Continue to complete your layout by adding more photos, journaling, title and embellishing touches.

Take a look at the layouts created by our Design Team and how they used the Birthday Blast Album Pak and Page Paks in the Design Team Layout Page.