Blending photos with papers

The paper, in it's original form, was created by Katie Pertiet. Of course, the word “paper” is a crossover from traditional scrapbooking that involved actual paper. “Paper” in digital scrapbooking would more accurately be called “digital paper.” It is actually a pattern or texture that comes in the form of a digital image.

I've seen many digital scrapbook artists blend photos with papers. It looked like fun but I hesitated to try it because I think that great photos should not be messed with. Yet I have gotten around this issue, as shown above, by keeping the main photo untouched and designing a background of textured images.

I took these photos a few months ago when I was home alone with my son. If you're wondering how I got those photos by myself, look at my right hand at the bottom of the picture (oops!) I used a flower to try to get him to smile. I know that's not very boyish, but I thought it was cute.

The “how to”

Blending photos with paper is a trial and error process. For this particular layout, I used four different background layers below the photo. The original paper created by Katie Pertiet looked like this:



The texture was not dense enough for this layout, so I had to tweak it a bit. The first layer is a black and white copy of the paper (to tone down the green a bit). The second layer is the original layer with the layer mode set to “overlay.” The third layer is a duplicate of the second, with the layer mode set to “darken only.” The fourth layer is the same as the third with a mirror flip (to make the texture more dense). On top of these background layers are the photos set to “overlay.”

And there it is! Now, I'm always looking for ways to blend images with papers. Through experimentation, I've come up with lots of crazy stuff!