April Club Digital is Here!

Each month, DSP creates a gorgeous collaboration of digital scrapbooking supplies called "Club Digital." It's a subscription that comes to your e-mailbox every month. Here is a layout I created with one of the kits, Forever Now. It's fresh and funky and I loved the little touches of orange that complimented this recent photo of my daughter, Savannah.

I use Adobe Photoshop CS3. I have had it for several years and it is like an old friend to me. One of my favorite "extras" that I use with my program is AV Collector. I know that PS has the same ability built in, but I have been using Collector for a long time and it too, is an old friend. When I start a new layout I do three things.

1. I open all the backgrounds and elements in Photoshop that I want to use in my Scrapbooking page. I usually add everything from an entire kit, and sometimes a few other bits and pieces from other kits.
2. I open all the photos that I want to use in the layout.
3. Lastly, I create a new blank scrapbooking page and run the AV Collector script. The script "collects" all the things I have open and places them in the active window, which in this case is the new scrapbooking page. Each element or background is on a separate layer and they are all named with the file name.
4. Actually, there are 4 things I do! I save my new page and then "Close All" open windows. This closes everything, including my new scrapbook page. After all is closed, I reopen my page (using the Recent Documents) and am ready to start scrapping with only one window open!

AV Collector is a free script and works in all versions of PS. It does not work in PS Elements. For PSE I have to manually drag each item into my layout.