Tuesday, March 20, 2012

FotoFusion Tutorial: Separating Alphabets

I have a friend who just started with FotoFusion. Her first question was, how do you use the letters that come on one page in FF? We texted back and forth, me giving her the step by step, so I figured there might be others out there who would like to know how to do it too. So I've created a tutorial for you. Here goes! I have a set by Traci Reed from Sweet Shoppe Designs called Little Miss that needed to be separated. It looks like this: 

Step 1: Open a New Project.


Step 2: Choose Custom size.


Step 3: You want a small canvas, about 500 pixels square. Go to your Canvas Settings tab, and input 500x500 pixels. By default, the measurements are in inches, but you want pixels. Click APPLY TO THIS PAGE.


Step 4: Right- click the area beside your workspace, and choose MAKE CANVAS TRANSPARENT. You want the letters on a transparent background.


Step 5: Go to the ORGANIZE tab, and find a set of letters you want to separate. I have a set by Traci Reed from Sweet Shoppe Designs called Little Miss. Drag the the letters into a bucket.



Step 6: Go back to the CREATE tab, and click on the BUCKETS tab, and drag the letters onto the transparent canvas.


Step 7: Remove the shadow from the letters. Hover your mouse over the FRAME dialog box, once the shadow is highlighted in red, click on it, and the shadow will be removed. Once you have separated all the letters, you will bring them back individually into the bucket, so you don't want shadows doubled. Hope that makes sense.


Step 8: Now, with the letters selected, right-click and select LOCK ASPECT RATIO and IMAGE FRAME. This will allow you to pan and zoom on the image, like you would with a picture. 


Step 9: Maneuver the box of letters with the blue handles, until it fits nicely on the canvas, with a bit of space all around.


Step 10: Zoom in and pan the little yellow star in the middle of the box and the yellow boxes on the corners until you have only one letter (start with A), on the canvas. Make sure NOTHING else is on the canvas.


You might have to move the whole image sideways so it's centered on the workspace.


Step 11:
-Go to the OUPUT tab, and create a new file for this letter.

-I like to include the store, designer, kit, and then the letter name. So, for this one, I called it SSD TReed Little Miss-A (SSD stands for the website I purchased the alphabet from. TReed stands for Traci Reed, the designer of the product.)

-Browse your files and pick a spot to store the new letters. I made a new folder beforehand, under Digital Scrapbooking>Alphabets. The folder name includes the store, designer and kit name.

-You want to render it as a PNG, not JPG, so be sure to change that, and then make sure it will be rendered (flattened) at 300dpi, which is the standard quality for digital scrapbooking products.

-Click RENDER.


This is what it looks like once you've rendered it.



Repeat steps 6-11 with the letter B, and on and on.


Each time you are ready to render, all you'll need to change in the File Name box is the letter name, unless you have worked with other files in FotoFusion in between this project. :)


Happy Scrapbooking!


Tuesday, March 6, 2012

10 Lovelies

Having some fun with my I-phone's camera app - Camera+.

My lovely daughter with some lovely chocolate goodness.

Loving my new bedspread. 
 

My lovelies loving each other. I'm loving it.



Lovely Junia in her winter hat but looking like summer. 


Some paper quilting blocks I painted or sewed on or both...


My momma with two of my lovelies in her garden from a few years ago...


Lovin' this pic of my lovely old soul, my daughter...


More old...this time my old typewriter...


My lovelies with my lovely twin's lovelies last summer...


Loving these vintage decals. Just like the ones I had on my crib as a babe...




What are you loving right now?





Saturday, March 3, 2012

Template 21


I made a layout of the latest template. With this template, it's important for you to copy the snowflake mattes that come with the file to your mattes folder on your hard drive, the place where the FotoFusion files are stored. If you don't know how to do that, please let me know, and I can help you.

Products Used:
Papers: KPertiet: From My Bookshelf - Solids
Alphabet: CD Muckosky: Suzie Q
Stitches: Traci Reed: Bad Sewing Machine-Write It Down, Brittish Designs: Tie It Down
Flowers,leaf, paint splat, number rub-ons: Vinnie Pearce Placid
Font: Century
Snowflakes: my own mattes made using a snowflake font.

Here's a preview of the template. Note: this is a Scrap. template which is made for use in Lumapix FotoFusion. 
For the background, you could put in a solid paper or a pattern. I used a patterned, and added two others from the same line. 
Occasionally I like to keep the border around the paper.

Three of the snowflakes are somewhat see-through, so if you would prefer them at regular opacity, just change that in the image dialog box. You could also drop in papers, since they are mattes, not embellishments.

I added some additional elements to the background: the numbers in the bottom right corner and some snowflakes, but reduced to a low opacity, so that they're not as bright. I just wanted to add a little bit of detail, not something that would stand out too much. Now these snowflakes are the same ones as I put near the large photo, but with shadow removed and "moved" to the back (Right-click>Send To Back).

Instead of using the title font, I brought in alphas by CD Muckosky. I love these letters!

For the stitches, I made sure they didn't go off the paper, only to the edge of the top paper. In order to "cut" short the stitch, right-click>Scrap Image Frame. Then adjust the blue handles until you have the stitch at the size you want. Sometimes this method doesn't work for some reason. LOL  If I don't do that, but want to shorten the stitch, it would make the whole stitch smaller.

Do you scrapbook a summary of each month? I always plan on it, but I somehow get lost in all my other projects. :)

Here's the download link to the template:


Happy Scrapbooking!