Pineapple Plantation Designs

Sorry, no freebie today - busy working on other design stuff. I do have a big treat for all of you (announcement soon, so stay tuned!)

I thought I'd share a funny store though, you might get a bit of a laugh! So, picture this; my movers are gone now and we have NO furniture, so dh and I go to Costco to buy an AeroBed (the big queen size, double layer one) we have it all blown up and made, ready for a good night's sleep right? It's the least we deserve after a long day of packing...

We lay down, cuddle up and all is well. Shortly after falling asleep I wake up to use the restroom (as I do about a THOUSAND times a night) and realize that there must be a slow leak in our new bed because somehow dh and I have both slid to the center of the bed and are kind of "stuck" there! I try (unsuccessfully I might add) to roll out of the bed without waking dh... when I finally make my way to the edge and roll off, the pressure that I'm adding to the bed disappears and dh's side of the bed lowers even more causing HIM to roll off the bed! LOL

Before I return from the bathroom, dh pumps the bed back up a bit, I "plop" down on the bed and it nearly flips dh up and over to my side of the bed!!! LOL We can barely stop laughing at the absurdity of it all!

Now we're both laying on the bed as it inflates and the layers of plastic between the two "layers" of this double bed start rubbing together with the inflation, making a crazy loud "popping" sounds ( at this point it sounds so ominous that I am fairly certain that the whole darn thing is going to explode, with me laying on it no less)! Dh and I are nearly wetting ourselves laughing as I tell him that if this bed pops with me on top of it that I might just stroke out! Here it is 1:00 a.m. on our FIRST night without our bed and we can't believe that THIS is going to be our bed for the next 4 months!

What about the rest of the night you ask?? Well, just read the above section 3-4 more times and THAT is how well it went!! Not a lot of sleep, but a whole lot of laughter!!

See you tomorrow ladies!!

Shauna

QUICK NOTE! For those of you who had problems downloading yesterday's freebie - Sorry!! - I've fixed the zip file and you should be able to download it with no problems now (same link as before!!)

So, today's freebie and Tut - it has been awhile since I've had a good Tut, so while I was making this page for myself: (See below) I thought I'd take a few screen shots and show you the quick and easy way that I often place photos in frames. As always, this tut is for Photoshop & Photoshop Elements users (sorry other software users!) I use PS CS3 and try to include specific directions for PSE using 4.0, so if some of my shortcuts or ways to find things are off, email me and I'll try to help for other versions!

So after I made the QP, I wanted to take this picture of me (far left) and my two good friends Lonna and Beth taken while we spent the weekend at the Royal Hawaiian for our mutual birthdays (all in one week in May) this past year. Here we are out for dinner at a Japanese Steakhouse enjoying some drinks and a good time. I could have simply imported the one picture and then duplicated it twice, then dragged the photo three times to the frames and rotated and cropped until they all fit. Rather than doing that though I placed us each in our frames like this:

1. I opened my QP
2. I opened my photo.
3. I edited my photo as desired (here I just used CS3's Red Eye Tool - so cool!) and made a few lighting and color adjustments. (Did I mention that I love photo editing as well??)
4. I saved my photo with the new adjustments.

5. Now I'm ready to place us in our frames:

I select my "Magic Wand Tool" Here it is in the CS3 Tool Bar (SHORTCUT is to press W on your keyboard)

6. I use the Magic Wand Tool to "select" the empty space inside one of my frames. I do this simply by making sure that my QP (or in my case my "Frames" layer of my QP) is my active layer - just click on the layer.

and then Click on the INSIDE of the frame you want to place your picture in (for me this is the far left frame on the QP. You'll know that you've done this correctly when you see the "marching ants" as they're called moving around the inside of your frame (of course in the picture below, they're not "marching" lol - it's NOT an animated tutorial for goodness sake!)

now comes the cool part...

First, make sure that you have both your QP and your photo open and in your workspace (one should not be completely covering the other, you should be able to see at least a small portion of your picture)

7. Now (IMPORTANT PART HERE) click on your "Marquee Tool"

Either select it from your tool bar as shown above or SHORTCUT simply press M on your keyboard (TIP! Have a hard time remembering all these shortcuts! Remind yourself simply by looking at your tool! See the little M next to the Rectangular Marquee Tool? The little W by the Magic Wand? Those are your shortcuts! Click on any tool in the tool bar and they'll give you the shortcut!!)

Now with your Marquee Tool, click INSIDE the marching ants of your frame - if you click OUTSIDE, it will automatically de-select the inside of your frame. If this happens, just use your magic wand tool again and re-select the inside of your frame OR go to SELECT>RESELECT and your selection (marching ants) will re-appear. (Don't give up! I know that this sounds a bit complicated, but trust me it's NOT!)

Ok, click INSIDE the marching ants and DRAG your selection to your photo (doesn't matter where, just drag it there... now your EXACT selection will appear on your photo.

8. Now, again with your Marquee Tool selected, simply click on the INSIDE of those marching ants again and drag the selection to where you want it (select the portion of your photo that you want to show inside the frame. (Here I want to see my drink and cut off some of my arm fat so that's where I put it! ROTFL!!!)

9. Now simply COPY (Ctrl/Command + C) this copies whatever is inside your selection and

10. Go back to your QP (TIP! Click on a ruler or the outside of your canvas somewhere, and NOT on your QP. This will "activate" your QP file WITHOUT de-selecting your selection - does that make any sense? LOL) This way you will STILL have the selection active inside your frame and when you PASTE (shortcut: Ctrl/Command+V) your photo will automatically be placed exactly inside your frame where you want it and there is no need to drag it to place it there!

Voila! You've placed your photo inside the frame, no rotating, no cropping or re-sizing!

Lastly, I repeated the above steps for my two friends (making sure to activate the QP or Frame layer after each time that I paste a photo) and here is the final results!!

Placing all three photos probably took me no longer than a minute or so. This is a great way to place photos into cluster frames that are all the rage here. Doing it the long way tends to get frustrating as you have photos overlapping other photos and it's hard to get placement right. Not to mention the fact that the more moving and re-sizing you do ladies, the more you photos can be "damgaed" by degrading the pixels. (See what I mean sometime when you take a photo or element and then make it really small then really big, it becomes blurry and not nearly as crisp.)

IF YOU'RE HAVING PROBLEMS, it's probably one of two things, you either haven't chosen the Marquee Tool to drag your selection (for example, if you have the move tool active, it will literally drag the portion of the QP you have selected, and not just the selection, to your photo) OR (what I usually do) you haven forgotten to activate your Frame or QP layer and so your Magic Wand Tool won't work (remember, each time you "paste" your picture into your QP, you have created a new layer and now THAT layer is active, if you try to use your Magic Wand Tool to select inside your frame and you have a different layer active, it won't work)

As always ladies, if you have questions EMAIL ME and I'll try to help!

So! That's it...a few Tips, a few Shortcuts and a little Tut! Hope you like it!

NOW, as for the freebie. I'm trying something new here today ladies, so please bear with me ok? I'd like to bring some extra traffic to Digital Candy (it's the least that I can do given all that they have done for me, so every so often I'm going to offer a freebie ONLY through DC. This means that to download the freebie you'll simply need to go to Digital Candy and download it from them instead of from my 4Shared account. I know that some of you may not like this, as it means that you have to take a minute to register an account with them, but let's face it, you only have to do that once and then you're done! LOL I'll provide you with the link to the freebie (it will be in my store) you just sign in, place it in your "cart" and check out. The amount will be zero, you don't need to give any credit card info or go through paypal or anything like that. Just click "checkout" and it will show zero as your balance, submit your "order" and there will be a link for you to download.

PLEASE take the time to register (I promise to make it worth your while as my plan is to have REALLY special freebies for my "exclusive Digital Candy freebies" like add on's to my kits etc.) The added bonus is that you'll already be registered to post your works of art in my gallery (I'm getting MY VERY OWN gallery here soon ladies, and I EXPECT it to be FULL! LOL) and please don't "flame" me too much for asking you to take an extra step or two to download your freebie, ok?? And if you think it's way to big of a deal to go to download your freebie, will you do me a favor and shoot me an email or post a comment? I'd love to hear from those of you who WON'T download the freebie if I put it up only at DC.

Aloha!

Shauna

This post was edited to remove the link - sorry!