New House

Hi All...Its been a while since I posted anything.  A lot has changed...we moved to a new state and built a new house...so I have not had a chance to do any digital scrapbooking lately.  I have been working on decorating the house.  I have been thinking a lot about starting a blog that keeps track of all my projects...but instead of starting a new blog.  I have decided that I am just going to evolve the current one. So eventually I will start changing the layout of this one....I am a huge fan of pinterest.  That being said, I will post my projects (a lot of ideas coming from that site).

My intention of this blog is that it will now encompass all of my interest (which are a lot...I kind of cycle through areas of interest).  So I will still have digital scrapbooking stuff, house stuff and other projects all listed here.  Once I figure out how to organize it all...I will get the blog setup..any ideas are welcome :-)

Great PSE Shortcuts!

I just found this site that had great shortcuts for PSE check them out!

http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/photoshop-secret-shortcuts/

Load Brushes in PSE8 on MAC

Ok to load the brushes you can do it via:

Applications>Adobe>Photoshop Elements 8.0 >Presets>Brushes

Free Actions

Check out the following for free actions:

http://www.cavesofice.org/~grant/Challenge/Tools/index.html

http://coffeeteaphotography.blogspot.com/

Have a great site for free actions? Let me know :-)

Installing Styles PSE8 on MAC

Here are the steps to installing Styles with PSE8 on a MAC:

You will need to copy the .xml and the .asl files both into the following folder:

From the top level MAC HD Folder --> Library>Application --> Support>Adobe>Photoshop Elements>8.0>Photo Creations>Layer Styles

If your style does not come with a .xml file you can copy one that is in the folder and rename it to the style you have...just delete out all the item stuff as you don't need that. Then rename the Mediadatabase.db3 to MediadatabaseOLD.db3 (that is located at Library\Application Support\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\8.0\Locale\ en-US).

Restart PSE8 and you should be all set!

Installing Actions PSE8 MAC

Great Resource for installing actions on Mac:

http://www.texaschicksblogsandpics.com/photography-page/installing-actions-in-photoshop-elements/install-actions-in-photoshop-elements-8-on-mac/

Also, if you are wanting to organize them in "folders" then check out the following on how to modify the metadata.xml file associated with each action:

http://www.texaschicksblogsandpics.com/organize-actions-by-category-in-pse-7-and-8-free-template/

Organizing with Picasa

2 posts in one day!...what can I say its been a long time. But with the three little ones and summer...its been crazy. Anyways...I made the move over to a mac from pc a month ago. I am still getting adjusted...I think the biggest change for me scrapbooking was moving from ACDSee to Picasa. ACDSee is beta on mac...and I didn't want to install a beta and risk all my organization not transferring once it was released. I also didn't want to wait forever to organize. Let me just say I am a HUGE ACDSee fan. I am a organizing fiend. I have to have everything in a certain place or it drives me crazy...so changing to a new organization style I did not take lightly. I researched lots of different options...and for me it came down to iPhoto and Picasa (everyone is different...this is just my opinions). In ACDSee I used categories to organize and didn't use the tag features and search that much. I just organized down to the detail with categories. With Picassa I didn't really have that choice (or iPhoto) for that matter. The two programs IMO are very similar. They both search quickly, use tags and you can create albums. The reason I choose Picasa instead of iPhoto was that you can search on color without tagging...which was huge for me not to have to tag all that stuff (as I did in ACDSee). The only thing I didn't like about Picasa was it was all single level for the albums...you can't have sub-albums.

How I organized Picasa to make it similar to my ACDSee style:

I have high level albums only (I use the create album using tag feature...love this!). So for example my main albums are: Kit Previews, alpha, design tools, embellishment, frame, image, journaling, paper, quick page, template

Then I have tons of tags off of these, I tag for example template, 2photo, square If I have a template that has 2 photos and is a 12x12 format. The more I tag the easier it is to find stuff. So now I can click on Kit Preview and see all my kit preview jpgs. Or I can search on 2photo and see all templates that are 2photos.

This way of searching is so fast! I have lots to still tag and just have been using this for a month but I like it a lot. Only thing that I had to go through and redo ...was I listed it 2 photo (with a space in between) it doesn't search well like that so I had to remove the space and tag them as 2photo. Otherwise it would pull anything with photo in the tag...make sense?

Anyway I hope this helps others as I searched like crazy and nothing that I could find organized the way I did in ACDSee so this way is at least similar so my brain can function :-)