Jamie, Joanna and Kristin, this tutorial is for you! I started it on the crafty blog but blogger is such a pain to use and placing my pictures was challenging so I just decided to post it over here.
When I first started digi scrapbooking, I hard a really hard time finding tutorials that were truly for beginners and any that I did find were videos which bothered me. I wanted a set of step I could read and follow, not a video that I had to watch and pause and try, then watch some more etc. So I decided to make my own, just for you guys.
So the first thing you need is a photo editing program. I use photoshop elements and you can download a free 30 day trial so that’s what I’d suggest you use…otherwise these tutorials won’t be of great use to you. If you decide you like it, you can buy it at Costco (at least in Canada) for $79.99, which is much cheaper than most other places. For your free trial go here and click on “try”.
Now I’m assuming you know nothing about using photoshop because I didn’t and one of the most frustrating things about the tutorials I could find was that they always assumed some working knowledge of PSE (photoshop elements) and I’d get lost so quickly! So my first (and maybe last) tutorial is going to be really basic.
When you first open PSE 9 it should look like this:
On the left hand side are your tools. If you hover over them you can see what they are called but I’ll also post a picture of the icon when I instruct you to select a certain tool. Each tool you select will change the menu bar at the top with extra options for that particular tool. The window on the bottom right will show all of your layers once you start adding things to your page.
Now, you’ll also need some photographs and I find a kit is the easiest way to find coordinating papers, elements and sometimes even alphas. There are tons of places to find kits for free but one place that I like is called Stuff to Scrap. It’s a store, forum and gallery all in one. I’ve also found that when you are ready to buy, their kits are very reasonably priced, unlike a lot of other scrapbooking sites I’ve found. In the forum there is a thread dedicated to freebies and there is a section in the store for freebies as well. Once you get to know that forum a little better there are lots of other places to find freebies as well. If you check this thread and this thread I’m sure you’ll be able to find something you like to use for this tutorial! You can also try googling scrapbooking freebies but that didn’t get me very far when I was first starting out. So download one of those kits and unzip it and we’ll be ready to go!
1. Click File>New>Blank and new little window will pop up like this:
Give your page a name and select the size you want. You can change the units if you want but I always use inches because I plan on printing them as 12×12 pages. For resolution some sites says to use 200 dpi and others say 300. I always use 300. Make sure your colour mode is RGB Colour and not something else. For background contents I’ve learned to pick transparent but at this point it doesn’t really matter. (I’ve started making quickpages (QPs) which is just a page with blank spots where the pictures go that other people can drop their pictures into and it’s much easier to make them if your background is already transparent. That being said, it’s pretty easy to change it after the fact so it’s not really that important.)
2. Now click File>Open and select the photos you want to open and any paper or elements from your kit you think you might want. You can always open more at any time if you find you don’t have what you want. Now your screen should look like this (but with your pictures and kit of course.)
The image in the largest box is the image you’ll currently working with. The images along the bottoms are the ones you have available to add to the current image and on the right hand side it shows you the layers in the current image. If your screen doesn’t look like this you probably just need to click on the “Arrange Documents” icon at the very top that looks like this: 
Then select consolidate all. This is just a personal preference, I find it the easiest way to work with everything but you may find you like something different. If your background isn’t on your main window you can just on it along the top menu bar and it should become the main window.
3. Now you are going to select the move tool from the menu on the far left. The move tool is at the very top, left and looks like this: 
Then you can just start dragging and dropping your papers and photos into the main page. You can also resize or rotate them using the move tool. If you want a specific angle you can type it in the top menu bar that will appear when you click on the layer to resize or move it. When you are done moving/resizing you have to click on the green check mark before it will let you do anything else. If you don’t like what you’ve done click on the red “no” sign and it’s got back. And you can always click undo if you don’t like something you’ve done. It’s probably the shortcut I use most [command Z].
You can scroll down in the bottom window to see all of your photos and papers. (The dragging and dropping can sometimes take a really long time. I’ve found that when I’m working with PSE I can’t really have any other programs open at the same time or it just works painfully slow. It just depends on how much RAM you have on your computer.) When you drag and drop, the image with automatically be centred on your page but you can use the move tool to move them around to wherever you want them on the page. Just hover over the image you want to move, make sure there is a blue border around it and then click and then start dragging. This can be kind of hard sometimes if you have a bunch of layers on top of each other so I’d suggest just adding one at a time.
Every new image you add automatically becomes it’s own layer and will always add on top of the layer that is selected on the little window on the right. If you want it to be somewhere else you can move it either up or down by dragging the layer up or down in the little window on the right.
Now my page looks like this:
4. My next step is going to be to add some mats to my photos. You can also use this technique to add strips of paper or boxes for journaling.
4a) So you want to select the marquee tool, which looks like this:
If may also be an elliptical shape. If it is just right click on it and select rectangular. At the top make sure that mode is on normal (unless you want a perfect square then select fixed ratio and type “1″ in both the height and width). You’ll also need to create a new layer by clicking either at the top on Layer>New>Layer or at the very bottom underneath your layers window on the new layer button (it’s the very first one). Now, making sure that the new layer is highlighted in the layers window, you can just draw a box around your photo. It should look like this:
4b) Next, you want to use the paint bucket tool 
to fill in the box. Don’t worry about colour or even if the box fills up on top of your picture. They are on different layers so you can move the picture on top of the box whenever you want.
4c) Then drag the paper you want to use for the mat onto your page. It should automatically go directly on top of the box but if it doesn’t you need to move it so it is (and when I say on top I mean the layer will be on top…not the paper – the paper will fill your entire page). It will cover any of the layers that are underneath it but don’t worry about this.
4d) Then you want create a clipping mask. You do this by clicking on Layer>Create Clipping Mask or [command G]. Your paper should now be just in the box you drew around your picture. If you still have the blinking lines around your box you’ll want to get rid of them. You can do this by clicking anywhere else on the page or [command D]. If you don’t like the part of paper that is showing in your box you can just slide it over using the move tool. When you are satisfied you’ll probably want to merge the paper layer with the box layer. You can do this by right clicking on the paper layer in the layer window on the right and then selecting merge down.
You can do this for all your photos or if they are all the same size you can right click on the mat layer and select duplicate layer. It will ask you to name the layer (I always just use whatever pops up) and then you can just move it around (using the move tool) to wherever you want it to go. If it’s on top of your photo just move the photo higher than the mat in the layer window on the right. Now my page looks like this:
(If you are using a plain paper for your mat you can just drag the paper onto your page and then scale it to the size you want, the above technique is good for patterned papers that would look distorted if you scaled them.)
5. Now I’d probably add my drop shadows. I’m going to add them first to all the pictures and then I’m going to merge them with the mat so that I can move them together. So you want to use the move tool, and right click on your photo and select “edit layer style”. (You can also use the box on the right above the layers window but I never do.) You’ll get a box that looks like this:
Click the box beside drop shadow and then it’s will ask you to select a size, distance and opacity. I always just leave the opacity alone but I change the size and distance to 15 px. You can do whatever you want, but I would suggest leaving the angle the same because then all of your pages will look uniform. Then click ok and continue to do that for all of the layers you have on your page already. (I actually add my drop shadows as I go but it’s easier for the tutorial to add them all in one step.) Here’s what my page looks like now:
6. Now I would merge the photos down onto their mats so I can move them around. You don’t want to do this before adding the drop shadow otherwise you won’t have a drop shadow on the picture, just on the mat. So make sure your photo layer is directly above it’s mat in the layer window then just merge down. You can do this for all your photos. I know some people probably don’t ever do this but I like to so that I can move my photos around with the mats. I only do this if I’ve matted my photos.
7. Move your photos to wherever you want them to be and then you can start adding elements by dragging from the bottom menu just like you did with the papers and photos. Don’t forget to add drop shadows to your elements. Now my page looks like this:
8. Now I’m going to add my title and journaling. If you kit comes with an alpha you can use that for the title and you’d just add it like you would any other element. The kit I’m using doesn’t have an alpha (and to be honest even when they do I don’t usually like them!) so I’m going to use the text tool. 
Select the tool and in the top menu bar will be options for the font, like type, size and colour. You can also choose the justification and bolded, italics underlined etc. To choose a colour that’s already in your page, you can use the eyedropper tool 
and just click on the colour you want. (You’ll have to click back to the text tool when you’re done.) After you’ve chosen font type and size place the text tool where you want your text to be and just start typing. I usually add drop shadows to my titles but not to my journaling. After you’ve finished typing you can move the type around with the move tool and you can change the font or size or colour if you’re not happy with it, but you have to have the text tool selected to do so.
This is what my page looks like now:
If you’re bored with the regular fonts that come preinstalled on your computer there are several sites that have super cute free fonts. The font I’ve used in the above page is called smiley monster and I got it from kevinandamada.com. Two other good sites are Sugar Frog Fonts and Miss Tiina Fonts. The kit I used for this page is called You and Me and it was designed by Scraps by Andrea.
If you have any questions please ask them in the comments and I will try to answer them. Also, if you know of some better way to do something I’ve explained here, please feel free to share in the comments.
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