As you may, or may not, remember I had set up my desk with all kinds of fun papers, stamps, markers, and stickers to do my week in the life album. I had printed 59 of the 166 photos before running out of printer ink, and even picked up some fresh cartridges to print the rest of the photos. I sat down, and started cutting. And cutting. And then my fingers started getting a little sore, so I started putting pages together. As I was moving a long at a snails pace I thought of how Ali Edwards put hers together. It was a simple formula for each day and I really liked how hers turned out. I also thought about how she mentioned doing the next one entirely digitally and decided that it was going to take me WAAAAY too long to finish up at my current pace. I felt like her, I just wanted it to be finished.
So I put down the scissors and opened up my laptop. I debated between using iPhoto and Shutterfly to print a digital book, but both were giving me fits trying to use the square photos. Note to online album designs: get with the times and have SQUARE photo options, thank you. To solve the problem I opened up Photoshop Elements and made a canvas the approximate size as my album pages (I decided to stick with iPhoto and my album was an 81/2 by 11). I then arranged photos on the photoshop canvas how I wanted them, saved as a single .jpg, and then uploaded that into the "single photo" template in my iPhoto album. For my camping photos I had a bunch that were not cropped to a square plus a couple of panoramic shots, so I just plugged those directly into iPhoto's multipage layouts.
I do have a small amount of emphera (flight plans, movie stub, maps) that I colledted throughout the week, so I left some blank spots throughout the album to go back and add these things. For the words, I simply cut and pasted from the blog posts (Again channeling Ali - why would I want to re-do something?!). I may go back and add some extra stuff in the blank areas around the photos, or I may not. So instead of my original plan, I'm going to have a mostly digital album with some extra embellishments added in later.
Here are some of my page layouts made using a combination of iPhoto's "Picture Book" theme and Photoshop Elements.
First page - You can see where I left the photo place-holder blank to add in my own stuff. When printed it will show as white space. For the words to the right I really liked how Ali Edwards ended her album, and this is nearly a direct copy of that. The iPhoto templates don't allow for you to put anything on the backside of the cover page, so that will be white.
Each day starts out with the day of the week, the date, and then the blog entry that I posted for the day. You can see the two instagram photos I put together on the right page. I placed them on a canvas in photoshop and then saved that as a .jpg. Then I set the place holder in iPhoto for one photo that took up the entire page.
This page uses three different images I created in Photoshop Elements. I like how it gave me the freedom to arrange the photos how I wanted and to adjust the size. The page on the left uses iPhoto's 2 photo layout with the images being horizontal. It did allow me to adjust the size of the photos even more... I think I made them each just a little bigger.
This page used the "spread" template in iPhoto. I love how I got my panoramic image to spread across the two pages. I did this twice in the album.
There were a couple of days where I had a lot of text. In this case I opted to enlarge the quote and re-color it to make it stand out. Then I put the rest of the blog post on the right page.
I ordered the album last night/wee hours this morning. I will share the additions I make in part 2. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the 59 photos I already printed out. I'm thinking some coasters perhaps?!? Any ideas or suggestions on what to do with a bunch of 4x4 instagram prints?
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