Digital Tutorial: Edit Your Journal Cards In Photoshop Elements to Work For You!

I am a digital layout scrapper. I love how easy it can be to customize pretty much everything. I can resize and recolor papers, elements, and even my photos. The possibilities are endless. Sometimes I wish a signature or journal card in a collection came as a full size paper. No problem! With some quick and easy steps you can turn that signature or card into a full size paper. For my layout I used two signatures from All is Bright.

This is a walk through using PSE 10. Make sure rulers and grid is turned on. (I left them off my screen shot so it was easier to see.) This helps align the edges of your signature/journal card keeping things straight. Create a blank white 3600x3600 file. Layer it from the background.

Open up the signature or journal card that you want to use. Copy and paste to your background layer. Select both layers. Align top edges and then align left edges.

Copy and paste again. This time you can align the top edge, but you will have to manually align the right edge of the signature to the left edge of the newly pasted signature. I usually just use the arrows to move to the left.

Once you have filled in the top half of the page, choose all your layers, aligning the top to make sure things are straight. Merge all the layers except the blank/white layer. I usually do this so I don’t accidentally move these layers when I am working on the bottom half.

Continue filling in the rest of the canvas, lining things up as you go. Once the blank layer is covered, you will merge all the layers and save it. Now you have a new patterned paper! I know I used a very simple stripe on mine, but this can be done with any type of pattern. Sometimes to make sure the pattern lines up correctly you may have to overlap the signatures instead of placing them edge to edge.

Another reason why I love Traci’s signatures is because they always have such fantastic word art on them. Often times I use them to make quick and easy titles for my layouts. This is another great way to stretch your stash!

Open the card or signature you want to use. Grab the magic eraser tool.

Click on the background surrounding the word art to erase it. Once this is done, go and erase any remaining background layer that remains inside of letters or other objects. At this point you can crop off any excess space around the word art. It is now ready to use as a title. Very important, be sure to save as a png. For my sample layout, I also applied a style, but it can definitely be used as is.

I hope you find this information useful and that you’ll be able to incorporate these techniques into your scrapping.