Layout Tips - Lesson 3

Welcome back to another layout lesson. This is the third lesson in a little serious I'm doing about making your layouts really look great. Today's lesson is about sharpening your layouts before posting in galleries. You can look back at Lesson 1 here (about photos) & Lesson 2 here (about shadows).

Now onto this week's lesson. These are all tips from me & my CT. I'll just go ahead and post what they said about sharpening & saving your pages for web.

Kristi: I ALWAYS sharpen my layout after resizing for the web. (in PSE 7: Enhance>Unsharp Mask>use these settings: 85%> radius of 1.0 px>4 level threshold) I learned this trick from Stephanie a.k.a. Nanie's Designs.

Tiff: I have also recently started sharpening my web-sized layouts. I use the procedure in this post from The Daily Digi.


Jenn: I have a tutorial on my blog about trimming your layouts to save space. (This isn't really about saving your image for gallery posting but rather just saving some space on your hard drive.)

Just a side note: Jenn has some other great tutorials on her blog. Check them out!

Carrie: I use this action to save for web...and it's free!

Now it's my turn. Ever since I read a tutorial about sharpening on the Scrap Orchard Blog (about a year ago), I've been sharpening my pages before I post them in galleries. I've changed my technique over the last year & I'll probably keep tweaking it.....actually I tweak it almost every time I sharpen a page. Ever since Carrie shared the action from Paislee Press I've been using that as my basis for sharpening. I love the action because you can adjust the Amount, Radius & Threshold to your liking. You can look at your page & preview it & play around & adjust it until you like what you see.

Before sharpening:

All About Me kit from the Scrap Orchard Designers.
Was available in the September Digi Files.

And here's after I used the sharpening/save for web action from Paislee Press.

You can see a slight difference & you  might not think it's much BUT when you post your pages in different galleries I guarantee that your pages are really going to stand out & really, with the action, it's only one click away.

Next week I'm just going to give you some miscellaneous advice from the team about making your layouts amazing. So be sure to come back for that. It will be our last little lesson on making your pages really stand out. If you have questions please post them here & we'll try to answer them for you in next weeks post.