IMP Blog Team Melinda Staley | Week 3 – Customizing a Page Template

Melinda here on the blog today to share some of my latest pages and a bit on how I go about customizing templates to make them my own in Photoshop Elements 2022.

It was my birthday at the end of January you might recall from a previous post, and I wanted to make a page with lots of screenshots and pictures of the various birthday greetings that I received on the day through various social media platforms. There is a great basic template in the store from PapierStudio Shop this month with lots of spots for photos and journaling on a single page. As it is designed in a very basic format for hybrid scrapping I needed to ‘dress it up’ a bit for my digital page with some paper mats under each spot and added stitching so that it matches the design choices I made back at the beginning of the year. Traci Reed has a great set of basic pocket page templates called 365unscripted: Stitched Grids that come with slightly messy stitches around each of the pocket grids and I found one in Set 2 that almost matched the 5×3 grid setup on the PaperieStudio template – it was just short one column of pocket spaces. With a little copy and paste magic, I could make them work together!

I discovered something about PSE recently that I wish I had known years ago – the simple way to move multiple layers between files in such a way that they are preserved using the Photobin. Since there is usually more than way to do something in PS and PSE I’ve used other methods that work, but they are more tedious. Maybe this little tip will help someone else.

To drag and copy multiple layers between files and preserve them as layers you need to do two things –tell PSE you want to make copies and drag them DOWN into the Photobin. So the steps you take are
1 – Select all the layers you want to copy to the new file
2 – Hold down the ALT key while holding down the left mouse button. The pointer changes to a double arrow symbol to show that the “copy to a new layer” function is activated when you hold the alt key.
3 – Drag the selection DOWN to the file you want them copied to in the Photobin and release the mouse button. You don’t really have control over where the layers are deposited – I think they end up above whatever layer is currently selected in the file, but I haven’t explored that to know for sure – so be prepared to move them to your desired place in the layers palette.

Now the layers I will use for photo mats and stitching are in my desired template file, but they do not match the photo/journaling spaces. Since they are the correct height, I just needed to change their width.

Once the width was correct, I copied and pasted the end mats and text box on each row to create a fifth one and moved it into place. For the stitching, I copied and flipped a portion of the stitch layer and used some quick masking to make it fit correctly.

The final step of my template prep was to add the LOVE cutfile by Neffy Crafts. While I didn’t do this step in exactly the same way during my page process I want to show it this way here to point out the difference between this drag and drop method and the one I demonstrated earlier.

This time I dragged a file from the Photobin UP onto the file I wanted it to be in. This method merges all visible layers of the file that is moving and places it above the layer that your pointer was over when the mouse button was let go. This method is one that I have used to place files on templates since I started using PSE way back in version 2 and it is important to note that it does not preserve the layer structure.

Once the basics of the page were set up as I wanted, I filled it up with my photos, papers, elements and text.

credits:

PapierStudioShoppe: Templates Vol 1
In My Pocket: Diecuts from IMP Life Stories Collab
The Practical Scrapper: I Love My Life
Neffy Crafts: Love You Digital Cut File
Traci Reed: 365Unscripted Stitched Grids 2
Rachel Jefferies: Sacred Time for Ourselves, Pocket Art Signature Kit 6
Project Mouse: (Main Street) Elements– music notes; (Main Street) Enamel Pins – Coffee cup
Sahlin Studio: Mouse Directed – mouse enamel pin
Heart pin made by me from card graphic with Mommyish Glittery Enamel Pin Styles
Phone pin by Susanna Brandon from TLP Enamel Pin exchange Feb 2017
Michelle Baxter: Teeny Tiny Alpha (retired)
font: custom font by Darcy Baldwin, Kingthings Printing Kit

I made a second coordinating page alongside the first using another 365Unscripted page template from Set 1, and as I decided to use some of the same small embellishments on it I was able to quickly copy them to the second page as is using the first method show in the post. Sizing, layer styles, etc. on these embellishments are exactly the same on the two pages with no fuss!

credits:
In My Pocket: diecuts from IMP Life Stories Collab
The Practical Scrapper: I Love My Life
Traci Reed: 365Unscripted Stitched Grids 1
Rachel Jefferies: Sacred Time for Ourselves, Pocket Art Signature Kit 6, Amazing Things Will Happen Mixed Media Artistry (purple flower)
Sahlin Studio: Mouse Directed – mouse enamel pin
heart pin made by me from card graphic with Mommyish Glittery Enamel Pin Styles
Michelle Baxter: Teeny Tiny Alpha (retired)
font: custom font by Darcy Baldwin

I hope today’s little tutorial helps someone else out in getting more scrapping done with less fuss.

[Please note that I am using PSE2022 currently, and while I am assuming older versions of the program act in the same way I do not have an old copy of the program installed to check that assumption.]