Club Scrap Blog Hop October 2014 - Homestead

Today I thought I would show you how to create a digital quick page that you can save to use time and again.  So with no further ado open up a new blank canvas with a transparent background.

Once that is done the world is your oyster so to speak.

Now select some of the papers and elements you would like to use.  At this point you can start building your quick page.

Here you can see that I have two different papers stacked and have used the rectangular marquee tool to select (rectangle surrounded with marching ants).

Go to edit and you will then be able to "cut" the selected rectangle out of the paper that his highlighted in the layers panel.  Duplicate this set of actions and you will create a "hole" in which to put a photo.

Wouldn't you know it, but CS has come up with a perfect cluster to go along with our newly created hole.

I have decided that the background paper (patterned) is too loud so went back and changed the opacity a bit.

Add your photo.

Select your stamp and in this case I thought that picking a color from the cluster was cool so used that.

Apply your layer styles at this point if you wish and you now have a finished layout.

Here is the finished layout with the photo and layer styles applied.

Now that you have a really pretty layout you need to remove the photo that you have tested your layout with.  What I typically do is turn off the photo using the eyeball in the layers panel.

To make this layout usable as a quick page, you will need to save it as a merged file.  A word of caution here - if you go ahead and flatten your layers at this point, your hole will not remain transparent.  So you need to go to Layers>merge visible.

The file type that is best is a .png which will give you the most color information at 300ppi.

This is the dialog box which appears when you go to save.

Once you hit the save button you have a quick page that you can use again and again.

Here are some examples.

As you can see - quick pages can be used for many different types of photos.

I hope you all enjoy my little tut on how to make a quick page.  Of course you can make these as simple or as complicated as you like.

Your next stop on the blog train is http://craftycolonel.blogspot.com/