IMP Spring Blog Team Melinda Staley | It’s a Party!

Melinda here with my first pages for March. My first foray in using the new products this month took me away from ‘current life’ photos. I loved the fun Celebrate kit from The Practical Scapper when I saw it. Who wouldn’t love those adorable little balloon doggies? I spent a lot of time scrapping my birthday in January and well, I am pretty much over that event at this point in time. The bright yellow and oranges in the kit kept drawing my eye and pinging some memories in my brain though. When I was little, I had a birthday party at one of my favorite fun places – McDonald’s. Yep I grew up loving Ronald, Grimace, Hamburglar and the Fry Guys. We ate at one on a fairly regular basis on our way home from Sunday church services as I have strong memories of that, and being a child of the 1970s means a lot of my childhood photos prominently feature the colors yellow and orange. This was one of the few birthday parties I remember having outside of our home, and I’m sure in part that is because there are photos of the big event. They are on slides, so not terribly easy to look at in modern times. For Christmas this last year I got a Kodak digital slide scanner, as I have been wanting a way to get those childhood years of family photos out of the garage and into a medium that was easier to view, share and scrapbook. Once I had the slides scanned I had fun scrapbooking this little trip down memory lane with a combination of the TPS Celebrate kit and the fun Dunia Designs Epic Cards. With a little selective color tweaking they work wonderfully well together!

Let’s talk about this first page and how I tackled some of the issues I found along the way in building my pages. I picked a much simpler style of pocket page than I’m using for my 2022 pages. I’m sure most of my memories of this party come from looking at these photos on occasion over the years. A much simpler style was going to keep the emphasis on the photos themselves. The photos I had were all oriented horizontally and I wanted to use as much of them as I could, so I picked a template with larger numbers of 6×4 horizontal pockets. Upon starting to put my photos in place I found that the actual slide photo area was almost square and fitting them into the pockets so that the frame was completely filled caused quite a bit of cropping I didn’t want. So in the end I fit the photos in vertically and placed cards behind them to fill out the rest of the area. This gave me a decorative area to either embellish or record on in more spots on the page.

Now, let’s talk about those fun Epic Cards by Dunia. I thought initially I could use them just as they were, but when I put them on the page some of the colors just jumped out and clashed with those of the TNP Celebrate Cards. The teal and red just didn’t work for me with the heavy gold yellow and orange tones in my photos and the yellows in the two kits just didn’t quite match. I loved the jumbled letter words and so I turned to the color replace tool to make them work with the page instead of clash. This tool is best used on high contrast, clean edge designs where the colors are easy to distinguish and select. A design that is more distressed with multiple shades of a color is not going to work as well or easily, but sometimes can still have some acceptable results. Don’t be afraid to give it a try as if you don’t like it you can just undo or not save it!

I’ve outlined the basic steps for using Color Replace in Photoshop Elements. The screenshots were taken in version 2021, but it has worked the same way in all versions of PSE that I have used over the years.

1. Pick your two colors before you start using the eyedropper tool. The color that is going to be replaced should be on the foreground (top) color square, and the color that you want it to be changed to should be on the background color square. You can choose/adjust these colors later in the process, I just find it easiest to have them picked out before I start.
2. Go to the menu at the top of the program and choose Enhance > Adjust Color > Replace Color. The Replace Color dialog box appears.
3. The items in your object that are the foreground color will be shown as ‘selected’ by either a mask image (black/white) or colored in the preview pane of the dialog box depending on which view you pick. I have a mask preview in these tutorial images – black areas will be unchanged. Use the eyedropper tools in the box to add to or remove parts of the selected area as needed.
4. If you need to adjust the color of the selection to get a better match, click in the selection color chip box and a color picker dialog will come up.
5. Choose a new color in the box or with the eyedropper and adjust more as needed. You can change both the selection and replacement colors if needed.
6. When you are happy with the colors in the preview, click OK and the changes will be applied.

I changed the yellow to more of a gold tone, the teals to blue and the reds to orange. Each color change is completed individually.

On my second page, I used some of Dunia’s 3×4 card templates Vol. 2 to make some photos into vertical cards. The photos of the balloon game were dark and with heads cut off just aren’t as nice to look at. Putting them in the 3×4 cards lets me still include them, but takes away some of the ‘bad’ visual impact. The one photo I have of me blowing out the candles on the cake is out of focus, so I gave it a decorated Polaroid style frame and reduced it in size a bit too. It is still included, but not the first thing you see on the page.

I wanted a few embellishments to finish of the page, so I went to a birthday kit, Hip Hip Hooray from Rachel Jefferies as I knew it had yellow and orange in it. In the end I didn’t use very much from it, just the stamped number 7 and some fun star sequins scattered across the two pages. Some fast food items- a bit of washi tape and some pins I made from a patterned paper by Kim Jensen were all of the extras that I added to finish off the pages. I left the red in those items as it wasn’t too bright and with the small size of those pieces it doesn’t clash. I love the big graphic dotty paper in the kit and used it to fill a couple of pockets. It seemed a bit plain, but I couldn’t find any dimensional elements that worked well with it, so I ended up adding the digital versions of the YAY! And streamer bits to it to give a more party look, and repeated them on both pages where I used the paper. And I finished off the page with sub-titles made with a font that gives a hand-stamped look (Kingthings Printing kit) and journaling in a custom font of my handwriting on my remembrances of the party and the gifts that I got that are in the last picture. I had those things for many years and didn’t remember that I got them as birthday gifts that year – the power of photos!

Page credits:

The Practical Scrapper: Celebrate

Dunia Designs: The Basics Epic Cards, The Basics 3×4 Templates 2, The Basics Monthly Cards

Gennifer Bursett: Pocket Pages Basics 1

Kim Jensen: Miscellany Mixer (washi tape), pins made from images on a Miscellany Paper

Mommyish Enamel Pin styles

Rachel Jefferies: Hip Hip Hooray Mixed Media (number stamp and star sequins)

font: Kingthings Printing Kit, custom font by Darcy Baldwin