Part 2 - My Approach to Digital Scrapbooking - Starting from the Project Life App

In my last tutorial post, I talked about and showed the steps of how to take a photos from a Project Life app page and turn them into a digital page outside of the app, using Photopea.com. If you haven't read that post, click the link above and go read it first, and then come back to this one.

In this post I'm going to show you how I do a couple of more advanced things, like add drop shadows to my digital pages, for that extra little visual something.

For this page, I'm going to start off by placing some photos into pockets in the a Project Life app template, and leaving the rest of the pockets blank.

For this page I used template Design A in the PL app.

Then I export this page as is and save it to my phone's camera roll. It's okay that some of the pockets are blank, and you'll even get a warning message when you try to export, but just click Yes.

Those blank pockets will get auto-filled with your chosen page background color (in this case, white). So now I have this image to work with:

Take that image and save it somewhere where you can upload it to your computer. I use Dropbox, but whatever works for you. Once you have the page on your computer, you can begin to work to finish the page digitally.

Now that I've got everything on my computer,  I open up Photopea.com, and start a new project sized 3000 x 3000.

Once I have my 3000 x 3000 canvas to work on in Photopea, I drag my page onto the canvas.

I want to get rid of that white background, so that I'm just left with the photos as my layer. Look back at my last post for the steps to rasterizing the page, and then eliminating all that blank white space.

Next I want to bring into my project a background "paper". For this project, I'm actually going to use a white digital cardstock, that has a linen look to it. I add that to my project, so that now I have two layers visible in my Layers toolbar.

Remember that the item at the top of the Layers list, is the layer of your project that is "on top." So I  want my PL page with the photos to be on top of the white cardstock, so I made sure I drag the layers in that order.

So now that my "photos" are on top of the cardstock, I want to add a drop shadow, to give the whole page a sense of depth. To do that, I select the PL Page layer, and then at the bottom of the page, click the eff button (stands for Effects) and select Drop Shadow.

This will bring up a set of options to choose from when setting up your drop shadow. There are lots of options, and I don't know exactly what all of them do, but I'll show you what I know! (Remember I just stumbled across this process myself not too long ago, and have just been learning by trying things out!)

Drag this whole options box somewhere on the screen where you can see your page underneath, because as you change the options, you'll see those effects take place on your page and you can get an idea of how the change you make here will look on your page.

I have really only experimented with some of the options here in this section. I'll explain what they do.

Angle: This little circle icon with the small blue dot and the corresponding number in the black box represent where the "light" is coming from, which causes the drop shadow on your page. In this example, it's set at 30, which means that if your page was in the center of this circle, the light would be shining from the direction of the blue dot.  Try entering a number between 1-360 to try out shadows from different angles. It's a personal preference.

This is what the Angle set at 30 produces: a shadow on the left and bottom of the photos.

Distance - This lets you specify the distance your shadow will extend. The bigger the number, the longer the shadow stretches. Try changing this number and then watching your page underneath and how it changes. I tend to like just a subtle shadow, so I usually keep this number between 10-15.

Spread - From what I can tell, this adjusts how far the shadow spreads. I don't really mess with this one, and just leave this setting at 0%. But again, experiment, see what different number values do to your page.

Size - This one determines the size for the shadow. Again, I like a barely noticeable shadow, so keep this number 10 or less.

Once you like how these settings look, click OK to apply them to your layer. You will now see that in your Layers panel, you can see that this layer has effects applied. You can click the arrow next to eff and see a drop-down list of the effects you have applied.

Now here's what I think is cool. Once you've figured out how you want your drop shadows to look, you can save that layer style, and use it over and over again on the other elements you add to your page! If you add a button or a digital sticker to the page, it can have the same shadow effect as your photos! To save your layer effects, right-click the layer that has the drop shadow applied, and select Layer Style from the list that appears. Then click Copy.

Then add your next element to your page, and place it where you want. Then right click that layer in the Layers panel, choose Layer Style again, and click Paste. The drop shadow with the exact same settings will be applied, creating a uniform look to all your layers!

That's what I did her for the remaining elements I added to the page (the pennant banner, the YETI letters, and the baseball bat/ball digital stickers.

This page I actually put a piece of black digital cardstock under each of the photos, but still had the drop shadows applied.  But hopefully you can see how adding drop shadows adds a bit of depth to the whole thing.

Try it out and see how you like it!