Indulge me for a minute as I show off something new I tried today.

Let me backtrack for a minute and say that part of my goal with this Christmas journal project is to learn Photoshop, so each day I’m trying to find something new to learn about, which is, in part, why some of the pages are taking me so long — learning curve!!

Last night I found these free Photoshop Actions at Atomic Cupcake (actions are automated scripts for Photoshop, when you run an action, the program automatically does certain things to your photo (or graphic or text or whatever) and changes it somehow.)

I played with the freebies I downloaded last night and they totally rock.

The Christmas present on the left is the original graphic.  The 2nd one is the Chipboard action, number 3 is transparency and number 4 is cutout.

(The Christmas present is from the digital kit I’ve been using for all of my pages, it’s by Erica Hite and is called A Joyful Season.)

Isn’t that cool?  All I did was click a couple of times and voila — all of these cool effects!  I suspect one of these will be showing up on today’s journal page!

I heart Photoshop.  It is totally awesome and cool.

I also heart all of the digital designers that create all of these cool digital kits and actions and stuff so that geeks like me can have so much fun playing.

Back to the sweatshop — there is quilting to be done!

Suzanne