Atomic Cupcake Digital Scrapbooking Tutorial - Creating Your First Page in Photoshop Elements

Supply List

Adobe Photoshop Elements
A background paper
A photograph

Creating Your First Page
in Photoshop Elements
This tutorial will guide you through the basics of making your first digital scrapbooking layout. This lesson is recommended for people who are new to digital scrapbooking or those who are switching to Photoshop Elements from another program. It works for Photoshop Elements 2.0 and above, though your windows may look slightly different. You will be learning about layers, adding items to a page, resizing them and moving them around, making borders, and the text settings.

Special notes about our tutorials: The red text indicates a choice from the main menu (at the top). In addition, (gray text) indicates a Windows shortcut key.Learning shortcut keys is totally optional, but highly recommended. Mac users substitute command for ctrl and option for alt to learn these shortcuts. I use photographs from clipart.com to illustrate my tutorials. Our tutorials are copyrighted, but if you have your own site, you may link to this page.

Step 1

Open Photoshop Elements to "start from scratch". A window with options will appear. Choose 8.5 inches for the width, 11 inches for the height, and 300 pixels/inch for the resolution. Color Mode should be RGB, and background contents should be Transparent. Click OK.

Let's set our options. In the option bar under the menu, uncheck "Auto Select Layer". This keeps us from accidentally moving the wrong layers later on. Check "Show Bounding Box". In the menu go into window>>images and make sure "maximize mode" is checked.

Step 2

Next, we’re going to add our background paper. I used the beige solid freebie from the Fly High kit here at Atomic Cupcake.

Open your paper: File>>Open (Ctrl o). Select the whole thing Select>>All (Ctrl a), then copy it: Edit>>Copy (ctrl c). Close the background paper: File>>Close (ctrl-w), then paste it your new page: Edit>>Paste (ctrl v).

It doesn't matter that our paper is larger than our page, since Elements only shows us as much as will fit. We can move the paper around to change what's showing.

Step 3

Next, we're going to add a photograph. We do this the same way we added the background. Open your photo: file>>open (ctrl o). Select it: select>>all (ctrl a). Copy it: edit>>copy (ctrl c). Close your photo: File>>Close (ctrl w), then paste into it your new page: Edit>>Paste (ctrl v).

Step 4

We have two layers now, so we should take a minute to learn about layers.

Layers work a lot like items in a traditional scrapbooking page. If I were making this page with physical supplies, I would have two seperate items on the table right now. I could move the paper on top of the photo to cover it, or move the photo around on top of the paper. While beginners tend to think of Photoshop Elements as working like a single sheet of drawing paper, it's much easier to think of it as a scrapbook page that hasn't been glued together yet.

In our layers pallette, Layer 2 (our photo) is the current layer.