Hello, hello and welcome to another installment of Tips from Team Awesome where the lovely ladies from my Creative Team share their most awesome scrapbooking tips and tricks. In today’s post, Inga is sharing a rather ingenious tip for how she chooses a kit to match her chosen template and photos. Take it away, Inga!

Hey fellow scrappers,

Today I’m going to share my little trick, how I check which kits go well with my images. I am a big template scrapper. So I usually pick my photos and a matching template first. In this case I had a relatively new portrait of my beautiful sister Maria. I also knew, I wanted to use a template from Lynnette’s newest re-release, Paper-tastic Vol. 2 (check it out here). I opened them both in Photoshop.

Then I put my photo in there and clipped it to the photo layer. I re-arranged the title elements and some embellishments to fit my needs better and show more of the image. But now came the difficult part: Which kit should I use?

I have a pretty stash to choose from. The portrait was one I took over the Easter weekend. Using the first mild days with beautiful weather and golden light. A spring kit from the wonderful Kristin Cronin-Barrow came to mind. On the other hand her darker hat and the colours also reminded me of an autumn picture. I LOVE autumn kits and wouldn’t mind scrapping it with them. Those were practice portrait shots and not meant to capture a certain day. I narrowed it down to three additional kits, I could see me using here.

What to do? Whenever I am in a situation like that, my method is to do a quick check of all options. Here’s how. I simply drag all previews onto my template canvas. Yep, those tiny 600×600 pixels images. As you can see, they are pretty small.

So, I blew them them up by using transformation. When you do that, they will look incredible pixelated. Don’t worry, as soon as you confirm the transformation PS will adapt them. Mind you, they would look horrible now, if you zoomed in to 100%. But luckily you don’t need to do that. You just need a quick glance.

As you can see, I didn’t put them in right under the photo layer. I left the journal mat visible over them, so my photo doesn’t get lost completely in the preview. I usually look for a few layers between the previews and the photos. Sometimes it’s already enough to leave the photo frames visible.

Also, in this case I used the older completely grey version of this template. With coloured elements, I either turn them invisible, into grey shades or I just ignore the fact that their colours might throw me off a little bit.

Now I turned the different preview layers visible/invisible as I went along and checked the overall look with each of them. Hey, my initial idea with the spring kit looked great!

This would have worked perfectly as well.

This one? Not so much. An easy elimination.

I usually click through them back and forth, comparing how I feel about each kit. Very often I find a photo/kit combination that just clicks for me! That will give me exactly the look or atmosphere I envisioned. I also use this method, to check if bolder kit choices will work or not. So there you go, a quick and easy way to test your kits with your photos! I hope, you’ll find it useful.

Awesome tip, Inga! So smart! If you have a comment or question for Inga about this tip or anything else, feel free to leave a comment in the comments section of this post.

Kits included in this post are: In Bloom by Kristin Cronin-Barrow, Oak Tree by Sara Gleason and Mint Julep and Amaranthine, both by K Studio.

Want to pick up the Paper-tastic Vol. 2 template featured in this post? You can find it here at Sweet Shoppe Designs.

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