Fun with Photos

Photos capture a mood and a moment, but with different techniques you can enhance those feelings through your scrapbook layouts. Here are a few ways to easily enhance your photos and give your layout a whole new look.

Experiment with Color - By simply changing the hue of your photo, you can change the mood and feeling of your creation. Using a photo editing program, first try changing your photo to black and white or sepia toned. As you feel more comfortable with your software, experiment with adding color to a black and white image by using your flood/fill or paint bucket tool and changing the opacity. This will fill the photo with a color intensity of your choosing - soft or dark. In the images in the two-page baby layout at left, Michelle Shefveland first lowered the saturation of a colored image, then added a fill layer of pink and set that layer blend mode to soft light to give an antiquish pink cast to them.

Try using your unwanted or not so great photos as part of your background paper. Using your deform tool, enlarge your photo to the width of the layout. Changing the color and opacity of your photo will help it blend in better with your original background. Because this type of photo enhancement may become distracting, be careful in choosing your embellishments so the layout doesn’t become cluttered.

Highlighting or spotlighting a piece of your photo will bring a specific part to front and center. For instance, you want to show off your daughter’s newly pierced ears but her ears in the photo are too small to stand out. Simply duplicate your photo in your photo editing software, crop a small piece surrounding her ear and place a solid paper background behind the smaller photo. This will allow her ear to become the main focus of the layout. On the layout at lower left, I highlighted my niece's new cell phone with a mini frame.

Creating fun, playful looking photos by mixing it up a bit will give you a whole new outlook on scrapping and will definitely improve your photo editing software skills!