Out of My Mind

I’m not sure what I was expecting but it wasn’t what I got when I watched the latest tutorial from Scott Kelby.  He made a template (I thought he had some magical method for making Photoshop build a calendar - dates and all) for building a photographic calendar that streamlined the process of exchanging photos.

While watching it, I thought to myself, “That’s sort of a goofy way to do that,” or, “Wouldn’t doing it this way work better and be easier?” but then he pulled a trick that made me rethink the way I use some of my templates.  Currently, I open a photo, put it on a layer just above the mask I want to clip it to and clip it.  That’s easy but Scott showed me a different approach to this.  He chooses Place instead of Open and brings the photos in as Smart Objects.  Then, once a page is done, it’s as easy as right-clicking the layer in the Layers Palette and selecting Replace Contents to swap out the photos.  

Here’s where careful planning helps make this a painless process - you need to know the orientation of your photos and they have to be the same dimensions in order to transfer without distortion.  Once you’ve got all that figured out, you can easily reuse a template over and over swapping the pictures in an instant.  Great, if you’re doing layouts for all of your kids and all you need to do is swap a couple of images to personalise it for each of them.

So, Scott, I’m sorry I doubted your genius while watching this tutorial because, in the end, you taught this old dog a new trick.  Thanks!

Tschüss!

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