Nap Time - and a Quick Photoshop How To

I took a few moments this afternoon to scrap a photo that my daughter took of her three boys all asleep on the couch. It's so adorable, and I wanted to get it on a page.

What's cuter than a sleeping baby? A sleeping dad and kitty with the sleeping baby!

I used the wonderful "Butterfly Wishes" kit by my friend Stacey at Scrapper's Alley. I used one of my favorite tricks for making a scrapbook page for guys - I hid the bow under the photo and only let the ribbon tails stick out. Sorry about that Stacey, it IS a beautiful digi-bow, though!

Astute readers will notice that there is NOT a golden background in the Butterfly Wishes digital scrapbooking kit (pictured on the right). Here's all I did to make it gold, which made the page pop!

I used Photoshop, but you can use any graphics program with layer blend modes (such as Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, for instance).

1. I brought in the grungy brown paper background
2. I put the green background paper over it
3. I changed the green background paper blend mode to color dodge mode
4. I adjusted the opacity of the green paper layer down a bit to get a soft gold.

When you use blend modes like this, lots of time you can retain all of the details on your papers, but get a wonderful tone shift. That's exactly what I wanted, because I loved the grunge and texture on the brown paper. If I'd done a color shift on it, it wouldn't have ended up with the various shades and vibrancy which the blend modes gave me.