I spent this morning updating our Fan Exclusive tab on our facebook page.  I want to give everyone the chance to check out our subscriber area.  So there is a very (VERY) generous coupon there.

Fine Print (and I only like good fine print):

*The coupon will give you the mystery % off any of our membership subscriptions.

*This discount will continue to apply with reoccurring payments.  So if you sign up for a subscription that automatically renews itself, the % discount will apply for each renewal payment.  Of course, you can still cancel at any time.

Now, while you are in the subscribers area you will notice that things are pretty quiet.  We have just recently opened this area and the members we have are picking up lessons and working on their own quietly, which is fine.  But feel free to post questions, make comments, respond to other's questions, chat it up, whatever.  We'd like it to be a fun and relaxing place to learn.

In our Perfect Picture class this week we are starting by learning about about actions - or effects - in Photoshop Elements. There are a ton of actions already in PSE and we also talk about how to install new actions. You can join us for a free trial week and pick up the lesson if you'd like!

After I had been digi scrapbooking for a couple of years I started getting frustrated with my layouts – they simply were not as fabulous as I wanted them to be. I did some gallery browsing and pulled up some layouts that I loved and studied them. I realized that the pictures on those layouts were stunning and that mine were fairly bland. So I looked into what I could do to get better pictures. I settled on three things: 1)Buy a better camera (mine was ancient). 2)Work on my composition. 3)Learn to edit my photos in PSE and actually spend some scrapping time working on the pictures.

The first I can't help you with – you might need to do some saving up on your own. The second is still not a specialty of mine but I'm working on a few tutorials and also hope to link you up to some great help in the free member and class subscription areas, so stay tuned. The third option, though, is going to be covered in Perfect Pictures - our Featured class this month!

We will be digging deep into many different sections of PSE to work on making our photos simply gorgeous to fit in on our amazing layouts!  I just posted the first part of lesson 1 this morning.  It will walk you through how to use many of the different aspects of the Enhance menu.  We will look at lightening shadows, brightening pictures, working with levels and curves, chancing the picture to black and white, altering the color and tone of pictures, and more.  It is really going to be too much information to take in all at once, but you can pick a few things at a time to play with and practice.  The more you practice, the faster and more natural it will become and you will be able to make your photos shine in no time!

Here are a couple of the pictures that I used in this first lesson:

Before - Notice how dark this photo was.

And here is the after:

And then we did this one.  See how white washed it is:

With some color corrections:

And in black and white:

And then we looked at this blurry picture:

And were able to do this to it:

If you are a class subscriber you can head here to see the lesson.  If you would like to try out our class subscription we are offering a free week trial!

We are celebrating our grand reopening and our November is going to packed with fun goodies!

For starters I'm opening up a free trial membership to our class subscriptions!!

Here is how it works:

Click here or on the Membership Sign-Up link above and you will see an option for a monthly membership with a free trial week.  When you choose that option and click the order button you will be taken to paypal to set up your subscription.  Don't worry though, nothing will initially be charged to your account.

Ever heard about your photo's curves and wondered what they were? Or have you seen those black and white pictures with splashes of bright color on them and wanted to try it out?

In November our featured class is Perfect Pictures!

Photoshop Elements was initially designed and marketed as software to edit pictures with. There are so many powerful and easy to use tools in PSE to fix up your pictures and make them shine for sharing with family or putting on your scrapbooking layouts.

Week 1: We will begin by taking a look at the Enhance menu. You will learn about levels and curves as well as altering the lighting and color of photos many different ways. We will look at fixing red eye and changing pictures into black and white.

Week 2: The second week takes us to the Effects Palette. Here we will look at layer styles and photo effects that can do all sorts of fun things to our pictures. You will learn how to create a sepia effect, tint photos, and many other fun tricks. We will end the week looking at how to install and use additional actions.

Week 3: This week we will focus on filters and adjustment layers. We will add texture to our photos and look at the benefits of adjustment layers and masks when editing photos. One trick you will learn this week is how to create a black and white image with a section of the picture still in color.


I hope that you will have a blast playing with your pictures in this class an will be inspired to scrap more because of it.

All you have to do to access the class is to subscribe to our forums.

For those of you who paper scrap or use to, did you ever have fun cutting fun pattern papers into letters for a title or accent on your layout?  Do you miss using your scissors when you digi scrap?  Well, there is no need to now.  Did you know you can cut digital paper into letter shapes?  I just posted a lesson about it in our class subscription section of the forums!

Learn how to cut out paper letters and then add fun effects like this bevel:

Or how about adding an outline in a couple quick steps to make it jump off the page.

Of maybe you'd like to ink or chalk the edge of your letters without even getting your fingers dirty!