December Daily : Day Five

Today's December Daily focuses on some shots I took around the house. The foundation for the page is a baseball card page protector that I cut to size to fit in my album.

A couple people mentioned in the comments yesterday that they were happy to see that I was not strictly adhering to content that happened on that particular day (re: seeing Santa in November and including it yesterday). My goal with this project is to capture and document the season. The photos I am using for today's entry were taken on Thursday...it all goes together just fine and in the end will be a look at the entire season of celebration.

One of the requests I often receive is asking for directions on how to put together a gathering of photos in Photoshop. This gathering can be printed out and used all together on a project or printed out & cut up before adhering (saving paper by printing them all on one sheet).

1. Open a new canvas/document in Photoshop. I usually do 8x10 inches at 300 dpi.

2. Open your first photo. Resize + crop each photo. For me (in Photoshop CS3) this entails going to Image/Image Size where I change the resolution to 300 dpi and, for these pockets, I set the height to 3.5 inches. Setting the height first allows me to get the most content from my original image rather than cropping first. From there I use the crop tool to select an area of the photo that is 2.5 inches wide (use the rulers as a guide) and then move it around on the photo (in this case to the left or to the right) to select the area I want to feature and hit enter to crop.

3. Move the photo to a new canvas (300 dpi, 8x10 inches) that can accommodate all six photos (or more). I simply drag and drop the photo onto the new canvas using the move tool.

4. Repeat #2 and #3 for the other photos you want to include.

5. Print. 

I cropped my photos using my Fiskars trimmer and adhered them back to back so I ended up with three glued back to back to slip into the pockets (see completed image below). 

[ See & Stamp Jumbo Uppercase Alphabet Stamps
(large alphabet stamps), Hero Arts Basic Uppercase (small alphabet stamps), Fontwerks Dotted Arrow Stamp, Art Warehouse Dear Santa patterned paper ]

Here's the before photo:

[ Baseball card page protector cut to size - look for these at a local office supply store; Every Jot + Title Red Circle Numbers ]

Celebrate the season. Read more about the concept of a December Daily Album and links to all related posts here. See many more examples from participants in the Flickr December Daily Group.