Winter is here and at our house that means we head to the mountains for ski season. Throughout the fall, my husband and children have been organizing the equipment and watching the weather reports, anxiously awaiting their first day on the slopes. I, on the other hand, spend most of the winter snuggled up in the lodge. The cold and speed of the slopes are not for me. So while they spend their day zipping down the mountain, I have time to catch up on my scrapbooking and to find fun new apps to use with my Scrap Girls products.
The Adobe Photoshop Touch app is my current favorite. Photoshop Touch is a cross platform app. It is sold in both the iTunes and Google Play stores for use with Apple or Android phones or tablets.
First, to use Photoshop Touch to scrapbook on a tablet, you need to have Scrap Girls supplies stored in your tablet’s camera roll. I use an online storage app called Dropbox to move supplies into my iPad’s camera roll. A previous tutorial about how to do this is located at the Scrap Girls blog here.
When the app first opens, the home screen with saved layouts and tutorials by Adobe appears. There is also a plus on the bottom which starts a new project. Click on the plus and a small window opens to set the pixel size for a new project. After this, the workstation screen opens (see below) with all the tools and layer palettes.
The workstation screen has many of the same features as Photoshop Elements for a computer but here’s a brief introduction to three.
1. In the upper left corner is a tiny picture with a tiny plus. This opens the screen for adding new paper, embellishment, or picture layers. To add products or pictures, click the Camera Roll folder. The app can also load photos from Internet websites and clouds, like Google or Facebook.
2. After opening a new product, the screen to move a picture or embellishment into place opens. Pinching the white dots around the picture resizes it. To move a product or picture into position, place a finger onto the circular arrow. Then move the picture into place. The white checkmark in the blue box on the right saves the placement and returns you to the workstation screen. In the workstation, the plus with the arrows on the upper middle right reopens this placement screen.
3. In the workstation screen, the Layers palette is on the right side. The layer that is currently being used has a white box around it. To rearrange the layer order, place a finger on the layer and move it to a new position. To hide layers, click on the white dot and an exclamation point appears to indicate the hidden layer. Photoshop Touch has a limit on the number of active layers that can be open at once, so periodically merge layers by clicking on the stacked “papers” icon under the Layers palette. This icon allows for blending of layers as well.
The Adobe Photoshop Touch app for tablet scrapbooking is the closest thing to the full-powered Photoshop that I have found. It has many features to create beautiful scrapbook pages. Check out the tutorials in the home screen to learn more about it or stay tuned to the Scrap Girls newsletter for future tutorials.