Highlighting children’s work with digital scrapping tricks!

This is what I started with, my son’s writing about things he liked about 3rd grade:

It could work but it was very plain.

So here are some thing I did with it using ACDSee Photo Editor to make it better!

Improved the scan:

I increased the shadows/highlights to make the his pencil marking darker on the scanned copy. Pencil just doesn’t scan well.

How to:

1. Select the image
2. Choose Light | Shadow/Highlights
3. Click on the previews to make the penciled text go darker.

Highlight certain things:

This technique is kind of like using a highlighting pen. My first try I placed a paint smear across one of the lines. It added color but made the text hard to read. So here is what I did:

1. Create 2 objects of the same image by selecting the image, copying it (Ctrl-C) and pasting (Ctrl - V)
2. Selected the top object.
3. Choose the Magic Wand Tool
4. Set the Tolerance and Select Color through Image
5. 
6. Clicked on the delete key.
7. Now this deleted my paper. You can’t really tell too much because you are seeing the paper of duplicated image right underneath this image. If you click on the eye to hide the bottom image, you will see that you are just left with the text. Like in this example:
8. 
9. Line up the top text image exactly with the bottom image. To do this choose both objects, select Align in the tool bar and choose the centering button.
10. 
11. Now we are going to make a sandwich of these. The bottom layer will contain the text on the paper, then we add the highlighting (in this case colored paint smears) and then add the text only copy of the image on top.
12. 
13. Save this as a jpg to be used on a layout or what I would do is this:
    1. Select all the objects
    2. Ctrl - G to group them into one group
    3. 
    4. Select the group and copy into your layout. The whole layered group will be copied into your layout and you can work with it like one object or if need be you can expand the group and make any necessary changes. If you saved it as jpg, you don’t have this luxury of making changes.

On some pages, I didn’t use paint smears but used a highlighting box.  I basically created yellow boxes and sandwich’ed them.  You could also you the pen or marker tool and do the same thing, just like a highlighter.

Drop Shadow

Lastly I added a dark gray drop shadow to the paper image to make it more realistic. Simple select the paper image object and choose Object | Drop Shadow and choose the settings you like.

I think it looks more fun than the original.

Paint smears are by Sue Cummings Summer Camp kit an exclusive kit by ACDSee.

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