QuickPage Tutorial

A quickpage is a pre-designed scrapbook layout with holes already made for your pictures. This is possible since quickpages are saved as pngs, which allows for transparent areas. This tutorial will demonstrate how to use a quickpage using photoshop elements (also applies to cs photoshop). Most photo editing software available will also allow the use of quickpages. A great free program to try that is very similar to photoshop is GIMP.

Quick and Easy Option:
1. Open the Quickpage PNG file
2. Place your photos below the quickpage layer and Resize photos
3. If multiple photo holes and photos are overlapping, use the eraser tool to erase the undesired part of the photo

Summary: (photo tutorial below)
1. Open the png Quickpage file in PSE (photoshop elements)
2. Open the picture(s) that you want to use for the layout in PSE
3. If multiple pictures in layout, consider cropping or creating a picture hole shape to clip each picture to
4. Move the pictures below the png Quickpage in the layers palette
5. Resize and position the picture to your liking (be careful to resize using corners to keep picture from skewing).
6. Save layout as a JPEG 300dpi (recommended quality 10)

Open your Photoshop Elements program and drag the quickpage png into the program. For this tutorial I will be using my ChooChoo Train kit.

 

Notice that the area for your picture has small gray and white boxes in it. This means that that area is transparent. Now open the picture that you want to use. There are several options to do this (either drag the picture in from your computer or go to file/open and browse for your picture. Once you have the picture in PSE, drag the picture into the quickpage workspace. 

 

Now your screen should look something like this. Depending on the layout of the quickpage and if there are multiple “picture holes” where the pictures may overlap each other, you may need to crop your picture. To do this select the Crop Tool (the box under the T tool). Another option is to create a shape the size of the "hole opening" and then clip the picture to the shape (see the TimeSaver Add-Ons Tutorial for more detail on this). Since our QP only has one hole, it is not necessary to crop our picture.

 

Make sure at a least a small piece of your picture is over the “picture hole”. Now in your layers palette (bottom right of your screen) drag the picture below the quickpage.

 

Now you need to resize your picture. Make sure that your Move Tool is selected (top tool on the left hand side that has a little mouse arrow and a 4 way direction map icon). Notice that there is a rectangle bounding box where your picture is even though you can only see a portion of it in the “picture hole”. Resize the picture by dragging one of the 4 corners. Do not resize by the sides as this will skew the picture. To rotate the picture, hover your mouse outside one of the four corners until the rounded arrow appears. Click and drag your mouse in the direction that you would like the picture to rotate.  To move your picture, click the center of the picture and drag it to where you want it. Once you have your picture positioned like you want, click the green check mark.

 

Now you can add some journaling or a Title. Make sure you are adding any of this to the top layer. You will need to create a new layer by clicking on the box that looks like a page is turned up at the bottom of the layers box. Then drag this new layer to the top of your layers box.

Once you are happy with your page. Go to File/Save As and select JPEG. I save my layouts at a quality setting of 10 to ensure high quality prints.