I really wanna learn how....

Whenever you go to a professional photo studio, one of their favorite tricks is to show a possible photo layout of some of your pictures thrown together...you know, in the hopes that you will buy more pictures from them at their exuberant prices. They have pre-set picture templates that they can slide your pictures into super easily, alter the colors or the positioning, and voila, an instant keepsake (or an instant eyesore, depending on your taste - like this Santa glove one). One place took this cute, but run-of-the-mill, not-even-the-Mommy-who-loves-him-would-buy picture of my Emmy at 3 month...
And turned it into this cute little personalized picture of him. In less than 4 seconds.
And there are companies out there who have pre-set announcement layouts that you can either buy and download to your own computer or you can take your pictures in to them and they create these beautiful birth announcements or wedding or graduation announcements in the blink of an eye. And then charge you an arm and a leg to the rights to your pictures in their layouts.

I don't necessarily want to charge anyone for anything, but I sure do want to know how to make the templates for myself! I would love to have pre-set templates saved on my computer so I could throw pictures in there when I am doing weddings and babies and such. And I really want to be able to make my own announcements and have them look classy and elegant and very personalized.

I know there are ways to do it. I have Photoshop on my computer and with it you can do just about anything. If you know how. That's where I get stuck. So tonight, after not finding any good tutorials on-line to help me out, I decided to play around on my own and see what I could come up with. ***I didn't even notice until after I had made this one and posted it that I put the wrong year on it... these were from this year, not last. Oh well, I guess that shows just how much room for improvement I have!*** So far the ones I came up with are very rudimentary and basic, but I think with enough tinkering, (and hopefully some luck finding some useful info on line) I might actually be able to come up with something that looks classy and profession and, well, not so highschool photoshop class-ish.

Maybe by the time this little man that I am cooking right now comes I will have it down well enough to make some cute announcements and some fun photo collages!