BOOTCAMP July 2020

[sandra jones]

Wonderful layouts every one.  The creativity is amazing.  This is my layout from project #4 or Bootcamp #8.  I loved learning all the new things we can do with Psp.  I used a kit called "Sweet Baby" by Cutie Pie Scraps.     Its a picture of my niece who was a miracle baby due to the age of my sister.  We are blessed to have her.  I realized after I posted that my picture in layout were a little darker than others so I fixed it to the best of my ability.  I am still learning how to "fix" pictures with PSP.

 

 

 

 

[MoniqueN.]

Carole, yes I had a selection, even followed the tutorial stap by step, but I doesn't change........I even tried it on another project, but it doesn't work.

 

I'm using PSP2020 :)

 

 

[Ann Seeber]

Finished the final project. I pretty much copied Cassel's demo, even down to the starring cat! I appreciated the use of the selection rectangle to corral the text. Good job, PSP! Here's my girl... Introducing Eve Seeber--ta da!

 

 

[cindy harris]

Hi I just got day 10 in had so much fun on it too.  Carole will there be a discount for Diamond membership in after this Bootcamp ends?   I hope I hope.

[Bill Kelly]

Here are my wrap up comments. I signed up for the course to learn more about PSP2020. I bought PSP to do more editing of digitized 35mm slides and very old photographs. I just wish it would run natively on my iMac. I run it on a Windows 10 virtual machine on the Mac. The VM was created to run VideoStudio which also only runs on Windows.

 

Anyway, I really did enjoy the class and learned more about scrapbooking than I was aiming to learn. It was fun! I believe I will likely create more birthday cards and Christmas cards now that I know the basic techniques. Using the tips we were taught in this class, I have created a basic "template" for a foldable card. Learning about layers and how to manipulate them was a huge takeaway from this class. All the other tips about materials and vectors to raster will be used very often I am sure. Explaining the keyboard shortcut keys is worthwhile. I have always tried to use the "Control+(key)" shortcuts as much as possible. There are many that are used by many programs in the same way. I am ready to learn more now.

 

Lastly, I just wanted to say I have ordered the book "Tips and Tricks for PSP" by Carole.

 

Thanks Cassel !

[Lynn Fowler]

Scrap Bootcamp - Day 11 - Project 5

 

Thank you Cassel for this Bootcamp.

 

 

[Cathy Anderson]

Hello - This is my Project 5.  With each project I have tried to use a different style of photograph to get me thinking more creatively.  This one was a fun project with the photograph (of my husband)  taken in the late evening while we were on holiday.  As it was quite gloomy, I have lightened it using the Brightness and Contrast using Levels, something I have never tried before.  Instead of using squares, as in Cassel's tutorial, I used triangles to create the banner heading.  The cartoons were all free clipart which I downloaded, colours were taken from those cartoons and the main font was Snap ITC and the journaling was Segoe Script.

 

The whole course has been thoroughly enjoyable and it was fantastic to see other people's work.  In particular, I learnt how to

 

1. Save images to 600x600 for sharing.

 

2. Wrap text within a selection - I had previous manipulated text manually.

 

3. Even up Elements using the Snap To Guides.

 

4. Change font colours using an open paper/texture.

 

5. Duplicate vector layers before rasterizing them.

 

6. Merge layers.

 

Thank you Cassel for all your input and I'll look forward to doing further tutorials with you.

[Cassel]

Frances, I love that story of your cats. That is the kind of story that is definitely worth adding to pages, otherwise, it just looks like a "cute" photo, nothing else.

 

Cindy, I guess that scuba diving will wait a year (hopefully). And no, there won't be a discount for the DIAMOND membership, because the next step after the Bootcamp is actually the Basic Scrap Course.

 

Kathy, I like the way you changed the direction of the title. It is great customization and it suits your layout perfectly.

 

Fay, those colors in the title are subtle but are matching the rest of the elements you used. It gives a very cohesive look.

 

Robert, if you set the Fill tool Match mode to None, it will fill all the selections at once. Also, thank you for your kind words about this Bootcamp.

 

Ann H., you should be getting all the emails anyways, so you might have time to catch up. You will see that, even if you are not a scrapbooker, these projects will get you to discover and/or practice different tools, commands and techniques.

 

Sandra, you did a great job to lighten the photos. The difference is obvious. The black and white photos are well enhanced by the subtle colors of the rest of the page.

 

Monique, send me a screenshot (by email) of what you get when you are expecting the cursor to change. I might see a detail or a setting that can be causing issues.

 

Ann S., it is quite ok to copy the layout I do in the tutorial. It is always like a recipe: the first time, you might follow it to the letter, only to personalize it later.

 

Bill, that concept of layers is soooo essential to work with PSP. I am always thrilled when I see PSP users have an "aha" moment when they get that concept. It seems like everything else suddenly makes sense. In the past, we have had Card making challenges around October. Maybe we'll have another one this year.

 

Lynn, is the text easier to read in the full-size layout? It might just be due to the resizing that it is currently hard to read.

 

Cathy, that is a fun tweak you did on that last project. Whatever shape you used, you practiced the technique, and that is the whole goal of those tutorials.

 

Another email is coming your way tomorrow. Check your inboxes.

[Brad Jones]

Hi Carole,

 

Looks like I'm stuck again.  For some reason, when I put my pictures onto the colored paper,  I have to use a resizer before I can even put them into PSP and finish resizing with the pick tool.  Then I got to the frame and had to turn up the tolerance to 152 to get more than bits of the frame to turn white and it still  has a pixel or two I couldn't whiten.  Finally, I tried to deselect that pic and go to the second, but each time I clicked on the second image, it would go back and restore the ants around the first picture, even if I moved the layer behind the colored paper.  Help!  I don't want to send another monster video like last one.

[MoniqueN.]

Carole, the mail should be in your inbox now :)

[Cassel]

Brad, when you select with the Magic Wand, what is the Match mode set to?

[MoniqueN.]

Carole, I think the Text thing works after all. Made another project and it seems to work.

 

The first project 5 art I will see if it works there too.

[Amparo Cheng]

Hello everyone,

 

With this project i learned to use guides for pictures. I had no idea these existed. I am also loving the short cuts. Definitively makes projects easier and faster to finish. I haven't used patterns in a long time, so it is a nice refresher.

 

I used my daughter's newborn pictures for this project.

[MoniqueN.]

The project I thought wasn't working, but did work.

 

My computer gets a bit slow, I remember there was a way to empty the cache for PSP, but don't remember how? :)

 

I like the short cuts especiially, but also never understood why you had to merge down..........now I've seen what it does more clearly :)

[Amparo Cheng]

Here is my project 4. Almost caught up. Wow i did not know you could do the edge design with the eraser tool. That was very cool to learn. I am enjoying learning all these little tricks!!

 

For this project i used pictures from my family Las Vegas trip from last year :). I enjoyed making this page very much.

[cindy harris]

Hi Carole, :)

 

I am just treading water without these,  bootcamps.   I got thru Basic scrap course  once and completed it.  Diamond a few times and no completed anythings :(  But boot camps I am getting better at :)  Still cant do that last rope trick around words.  Still trying have lots of pictures, just haven't pulled them out till I can do some things.  But I know I am learning, these people are good I think.  If I could be as good as them Ild be happy.   As good as you is a dream.

 

I love the babies, layouts they are great.  Course look at the subject :)

 

I submitted a picture in the scavenger hunt I put dots around my findings I don't know how to draw or highlight them.

[simon kidd]

Sadly my PC completely misbehaved on me this evening (a windows update started ...)

I was going so well, but my PSP completely locked up and I couldn't save anything - file menu broken. Although I thought I had saved 2 previous versions, they seem to have vanished and no temporary file on reloading either  either). The best I could manage was a screen grab at the last minute - so here it is.

 

I got the pattern for the text and played with the word wrap and tilted the pictures. The frame I used seemed to have a bit of a bevel on it already and so adding more bevel didnt change it much. I found a free star themed kit on 'scrapvine' called all the stars

 

I had just added the wrapping text and was about to add some details and some shadows.

This was a special present as a kit of lots of bits for a special (Im not telling) birthday.

 

Replying to myself here - I have got to exactly the same point 6 times now and both PSP2019 and PSP2020 crash on me. If I add a vector layer at the stop of the stack of raster layers and put some text in that is using a pattern from another picture and then add another vector layer and then try to save (with or without text), the file menu does not respond.

 

 

[sandra jones]

Carole:  Thank you so much for all the work you put in to give us Boot Camp.  I have learned so many things and have enjoyed myself immensely.  I think every one has pretty much listed the things I have learned and there has been many but my favorite would have to be the text with the selection.  What a cool thing to learn! No more struggling to resize text and put text where I want it to go.    I still have lots to learn on fixing photos, colors to use and how to arrange my layout.  Some days I have a real hard time with it but this course has definitely made it easier.

 

To every one else:  The layouts that I have seen are just gorgeous.   Great job every one!

 

Here is my Boot camp #11 or project # 5.  I struggled for some reason with my title and text connecting so I couldn't put a drop shadow without it going on the text also.  It gave me a run time error and shut my program down after that I had to restart my project which was a pain.  Taught me the hard way to save my project a couple of times while creating it.

 

 

[simon kidd]

Here is project 5 again after a re-start.

I seem to have issues every time I try and fill text with a pattern from another picture/paper file. (It seems to work fine with a 'built in' pattern but not another image), so Ive left that out for now and will return to that another day.

 

Ive have really enjoyed this. Scrapbooking is new to me and so I think its a good way to compose small collections of themes and present a picture or topic. Much more interesting than a picture album. Ive learned alot more about PSP. Until recently my use had been pretty limited.

So thank you.

[Cassel]

Brad, I watched your long Loom video and sent you my comments. The reason you have to resize all the time is that you are starting with a blank image that is 600x600 instead of 3600x3600. It is like trying to put a poster board onto a post-it. Keep the Rulers active all the time, so you can see the number of pixels for each paper, photo or element. As for adding the frame, check whether the Fill tool has a Match mode set to RGB or to None. Ideally, it should be set to None, otherwise, it gives some odd results.

 

Monique, that is so creative to use the @ in the title! I might have to steal that idea! To empty the cache, I'll have to check as I only know how to empty the cache for specific tools but not for the whole program. The merging is not always necessary, but in some situations, it can be very convenient!

 

Amy, those are lovely pictures and they are very well showcased. Yes, the Guides can be so helpful when you want something sized the same, or aligned. The pinking shear trick can also be used for many other types of edges when you use different shapes of tips, different sizes, and there is even a complete other palette that has a dozen more settings to play with. Those brush tips can be used in soooo many ways. I have whole classes just on that inside the membership!

 

Cindy, I see that you definitely work better when you have a complete project to finish and have tutorials from start to finish. Inside the membership, you have the individual tutorials but you still have to put them together. For the Scavenger hunt, you can go inside the membership, and find the tutorials to create some of those elements yourself, and then, once you have gathered them, you can put them together into one project.

 

Simon, you are correct in noticing the existing bevel on the frame. That shows a good sense of observation, and it will be very useful when you will want to use some particular elements. Eventually, you might even find that some elements are in the wrong direction or something like that. Good work. The filling of the text is a bit tricky. In older versions of PSP, you could select the materials and then apply the text. Now, it is like it will ignore what you have in the Materials palette, but will use the colors/patterns in the toolbar instead, or will want you to change it after. It is very picky and I might actually choose to complain about it to the development team.

 

Sandra, I hope that you will be able to read the text on the full-size project (#5). On the resized version, it is too small to read but it is ok. That is not the important version. I am curious if you used a font that was purposefully spacing the letters or if you might have changed the kerning yourself? Just curious.

[Amparo Cheng]

Cassel that class sounds very interesting. I will look into it :) Here is my last project. This was my first time using Inner Bevel. I enjoyed this class very much. I love scrapbooking with real paper and pictures. This was my first time doing it digitally. The possibilities are endless! I found this bootcamp very useful. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and your time.

[Fay Burnett]

Well I've finally finished all the Projects.  I'm still having a little trouble using the Text tool but I know it's because I forget to use the "Apply" action.  I know it was present in PSP 15 but I never used it and never had problems.  I took this Bootcamp to help me switch from PSP 15 to PSP 19 and I will be able now to do just that so it has been a great success for me.  I got tired of scrapping the scenic photos so did something different for Project 5.  All the papers and elements are from my kit "Brand New" which I'm still working on.  The fonts I used are Heartland Regular and Lucida.

 

I see a lot of beautiful layouts have been created, especially for this last project which just proves how much we have all learned.  Thank you Carole.

[Cassel]

Amy, yes, digital scrapbooking has options that are impossible in traditional paper scrapbooking. That is one reason some people do convert to digital although you don't have to give up your paper tools! Your photo is so well showcased. I bet your family is proud of what you did!

 

Fay, for the Text tool, if you happen to activate a different layer or a different tool, it will usually apply automatically. It is mostly if you want to change something in the Materials palette that it can mess up things. I am glad to hear that you are more comfortable with your more recent version of PSP.

[Brad Jones]

Weirdly #4 went really easily after I figured out that one thing (shift, not 6).  I had to try a number of the steps over many times, but at least the whole program (PSP) didn't come crashing down around my ears or freeze up.  I didn't get too creative and pretty much followed your design and I did all the text on one layer, but it worked and I may never understand that.  Maybe it is starting to make some kind of sense and that is very frightening.

[Brad Jones]

To Cindy Harris,

Believe me, you are as good as anybody else in here. Everyone has gone thru what you are going thru and worse. Ask Carole questions and she will give you so much help. Look in your heart and just fly with it. don't worry about copying, but let yourself feel it when you do things. Ask anybody else in here and I bet most of them will pour out their hearts to you. Keep going over Carole's videos and watch carefully for little tiny things she does that you might miss and make notes. Live by the F word....Flexibility and be persistent. There will be ups and downs but eventually the ups are more frequent and higher. Every woman I know is so strong she won't let a little thing like this defeat her. Go, Go Go!