It's the Small Things

Paper Bag Mini Book Tutorial

 

It took me 6 years to get up the courage to make this album. I am working on my other son's, right now, too. It was definitely a labor of love and feels wonderful to have. Here is what I wrote about the album:

In 2004 Vanessa Reyes won the Chatterbox Make it Meaningful contest with her "If For Any Reason" album. When I saw her album, I cried. I knew I needed to make an album like this for my son. The album consists of letters to a child for all of the major moments in life. Both Vanessa and her husband wrote letters to their daughter with words about these moments and tucked them lovingly into the album. The purpose of the book is that if for any reason one of them were no longer in their daughter's life, she would still have their words to read and cherish. It's taken me 6 years to finally sit down and make this album. My husband and I both spent hours crying while writing these letters. As emotionally difficult as it was to do, we are thrilled to have this for our son. The album is his to read whenever he wishes. The great thing about paper bag albums is that you can easily add to them. I have another 6 big moments I want to include in this book and it will be simple to do because of the format.

Have a wonderful Holiday weekend! 

Lori
 

Father's Day Tiny Book

I made this fun little tiny book for Father's Day after being inspired by Julie Collings and her Artful Thursday post. 

I have to say, these are really addicting. I already have plans for many, many more of these. I adore them to pieces. 

They are quick and easy to put together and they make a BIG impression. I know my husband will love his on Father's Day. 

Each tiny book has a cover, six pages and a back cover. Hop over to the Lily Bee Blog to see a tutorial on how to make one of your own. 

I used Lily Bee's Hello Sunshine Collection to create my book. It's bright and cheery and makes me happy! Have a great week!   

Totally Rad Actions in Action

I'm a huge fan of Totally Rad Actions. I use them all the time to punch up my layouts before I post them online. I do my best to take pictures of my layouts in indirect sunlight for the best natural look, but I usually need to punch them up just a bit. 

I recently had a deadline and had to take the photo of my layout at night. That meant it was going to look yellow. I wasn't worried about it because I knew I could easily correct the color with some actions. What I did have to sacrifice was crispness. 

Being an amateur photographer means I have no clue how to adjust for evening photos with no flash. I do shoot in manual mode, however, and I knew that I would need to bump up my ISO to 800 to get the image with no flash. On my old camera, a Canon 10d, that means lots of noise, which to me, looks like blurriness. 

Still, I knew the actions would help compensate for these two problems, noise and color. 

I thought I'd share what I did. A few things before I begin:

• I am not a pro photographer. The actual photograph on this page was taken by Pascale Wowak. The photo of the layout, however, was taken by me. :)
• I am a hacker in photoshop. Most of what I know is self taught from manuals. 
• Totally Rad Actions do not work with elements. It requires Photoshop CS2 or up.  

To take this photo, I needed to tape it at eye level to my wall. I have overhead lighting in my room and trying to stand over my layout on the floor would have caused shadows from every angle. It was important to get the shot without any shadows and taping it to the wall was the solution. 

Here is the shot straight out of the camera. I created this layout using BasicGrey's new Basics Collection in white. You can see it is more yellow than white in this picture, which is due to the lighting in the room. 

In order to remove the yellow. I used the action "Cool as a Cucumber". This adds blue to the image and effectively removed most of the yellow. Normally, I would never use an action at 100% opacity, but I did here. I even ran the action a second time, but ultimately removed it, as it made the black and white photo too blue. 

Next, I needed to correct the blurriness. I ran the action "Boutwell Magic Glasses". This is my favorite action for sharpening an image. The image is still a little blurry, but the action made it sharper. 

The last thing I wanted to do was brighten the whole thing. It needed that punch I referred to earlier. I ran the action "Oh Snap". This punched up the colors by making them brighter and it, also, added some sharpening. 

At this point, I was satisfied with the image, saved it and sent it off. 

The Totally Rad Action set I own is The Original Set; TRA1. You can read the descriptions of all the actions for a better idea of what they are supposed to do. My descriptions are based on my observations vs. the technical photoshop speak, so if you want that, go check out their site because they do a great job of explaining in technical detail. 

This layout was for the BasicGrey May newsletter and is based on a sketch provided by Kelly Goree. Kelly is uber cool and crazy talented. Each month she posts on facebook that she needs volunteers for creating layouts for the BasicGrey newsletter. Then she randomly picks three people. Cool, huh?  

It's a holiday weekend here and my family is being mellow and staying home. I hope all of you are enjoying your day.