There were some articles recently published on ScrapJazz which focused on the basics of photographing your layouts. I thought I’d share them here.
Denise Gormish wrote the first back in April which dealt with the basics of photographing a layout and then followed up with some more advanced techniques earlier this month. She has some great tips in there, and they are well worth a read.
I would also like to add a few more for those who have access to PhotoShop or PhotoShopElements, both available from Adobe or any other digital imaging program with a Skew function.
First, Denise suggest adding some white or black to the layout (which she suggests you can later edit out). The premise is something to which I would wholeheartedly agree, and in fact do myself. I simply take a white envelope, and place it beside my layout. By adding something white, it is easy to go in and fix any colour casts at the touch of a button, especially useful since I photograph my layouts indoors.
After I have colour corrected my layout, I crop my layout to 12 by 12-inches, getting as close to the edges as possible, but without cutting off any of the layout.
Next, go to Image—> Transform—> Skew. (It’ll pop up a window about a new background layer, just enter through that… technically, you can create a new background layer first, but I’m too lazy to bother, especially when the program will do it for me with a couple touches of the enter key.) Now simply drag the corners of the layout to meet the edges of your crop until you no longer see any background. Voila! A perfect 12×12 layout without any background.
Now you’ll need to flatten the layers (under Layers—> Flatten Layers), and resize and save your layout as needed.
The Skew function is very useful if you can’t get perfectly perpendicular to your layout (for instance, I lay mine on the coffee table, and get it ‘as close as possible’ knowing I can fix any coverging verticals with the Skew function).
If you have a two page layout, just take two photographs, edit each separately, and stitch them together. :)