I have been a traditional scrapbooker for years, but have been intrigued by the digital layouts posted here. I took the plunge and purchased SBC+ after reading all of the great things you guys in this thread have said about it. I have been playing around with it and absolutley love it. I read through the whole thread and copied and pasted all of the info I think I will need as I go along into a Word document.
So far I have two questions:
1. When do you use shadows? Do you use them for one major thing on a layout, for everything? No clue what to do with them!
2. What is Flatten? When do I do this and why?
Thanks for the help!
I think the shadows totally make the layout.... After you get a handle on the software, you will find yourself wanting to really play with the shadows... because they do make a huge difference. When I started, I used the default shadows for pretty much everything ("light" for paper and photos and "heavy" for flowers and chunkier embellies.) They were fine, and I liked my LOs, but I started really looking at the shadows on other layouts that I liked, and kind of played around until I matched them.... now I hardly ever use the defaults. I like throwing my shadows toward the top left (the default throws them to the bottom right), and I usually change the color to dark brown instead of gray.... I usually go with around a .9 depth and .7 softness for papers and photos... and anywhere from 1.2 - 2.5 depth and softness for larger elements.... For stitches or paint splats or something with little depth, I will still shadow a tad (about .3 depth and .2 softness). I like the softness to be a little lower than the depth... it makes the shadows a little sharper and less "floaty"....
One little trick I use a lot to get all of the shadows going the same direction and get them the same color is: I click on my LO and then click CTRL A.... that will select everything... Then I go up and click the little arrow below the Shadow box.... Then I throw the shadows to the top left (spin the little dial thingy to about 10:00), then I choose the color (usually the darkest brown and then I make it a little darker), then I set the depth at .9 and the softness at .7... then I click "accept." Now, everything on the page will be shadowed the same... Then it's easy to select all of the flowers (or whatever) and go back and just increase the depth and softness ( you won't have to worry about the color or the direction), or select all of the stitches and decrease it, etc.... and I wouldn't shadow font, so I would just remove it.
Sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo... but once you get used to it, it takes no time... You can shadow an entire LO in less than 2 minutes.... SBC+ makes it so easy.... I was reading a chat about shadowing in photoshop programs and almost fainted it sounded so complicated.
As far as the "flatten" function... you don't really have to worry about it because SBC+ will prompt you when you need to use it. For example, if you want to use your circle tool and cut a photo into a circle shape, you will have to flatten it first..... But SBC+ will just pop up and tell you that you need to flatten before you can cut, and you just click "OK".... So for the most part, you would use it under those kinds of circumstances...
I haven't been over here much lately... so glad to see more people joining in.
