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Epson Computer Tip: Color Coordinate Your Embellishments and Your Page Fonts

Here’s a hot digital design tip for your layouts. Coordinate the colors of the fonts on your page to elements or other papers used on your layout. It helps tie everything together and looks so professional.

Many scanners and printers come with Adobe Photoshop Elements (PSE), a powerful graphic editing program.

1) Plan your scrapbook layout and decide which papers and embellishments you’d like to use on your page. Decide where your journaling will go, and measure that space. In the case of the project shown, the journaling will be placed in the lower right corner and measure 4” x 5”.

2) Open up PSE, and scan in the part of your layout that has the color you want to match for your journaling. To scan in the layout, go to File – Import. Chose your scanner, and this will open up your scanner driver. Make sure your resolution is set to 300 dpi. Preview your layout, then use the marquee tool to draw a rectangle around the area you want to scan. Now click on “Scan”. The scan of your layout will appear in PSE, and you can close down the scanner driver window.

3) You may choose to match embellishments such as buttons or ribbons, cardstock, or even a portion of the picture itself (such as someone’s eyes or clothes).

4) The next thing to do is to create a new file for your journaling by going to File – New. You’ll be prompted to name the file (i.e. “Journaling). Then change the width to 4 inches for the project shown and height 5 inches. Change the Resolution to 300 pixels/inch so that you can print it. Change the Mode to RGB color. In the case of the project shown the background is white – so check that, too.

5) Now type your journaling by selecting the Type Tool in the toolbox. You can type the journaling in black initially and then as in the project shown go back and select certain words to change the font color. Each script-like word is a separate layer, so that it can be moved separately. Also, each line of text is a separate layer.

6) Next, you can go in and change the colors of some of the words, or all of them. First, double click on the word that you want to change to highlight it. Then click on the Set Foreground Color box at the bottom of the toolbox. (That will bring up the Color Picker Window.)

7) When you move your mouse over any part of your workspace, the cursor changes into an eyedropper, and you can “pick up” the exact color from anywhere on you layout. You can tell what color you have picked up by looking at the 2 rectangles to the left of the Cancel button in the Color Picker box. The top rectangle tells you what color you have currently selected, and the bottom rectangle is your previous color. When you have a color you like, click OK. Now notice that your foreground color box is the color you just picked up with your eyedropper, and your type has also changed to that color.

8) You can change the words to different colors with the same technique. To select a different word, type “T” to select the type tool again, then just double click on the word you want to select. Click on the foreground color box to bring up the color picker window. Then click on an element in your layout to pick up the color from that area. When you have selected a color you like, click OK, and then your font will be the newly selected color.