Altering My Digital Studio Background Paper Tutorial

Tom and I have been away for a short vacation in sunny (though not necessarily warm) Arizona.  We flew into Phoenix (warm) and drove to Flagstaff (cold).  It was 9 degrees the first morning!  We took a train from Williams to the Grand Canyon for our first day.  What a beautiful sight!

Later in the hotel I was making this quick little scrapbook page on My Digital Studio and discovered a neat trick for altering background paper to give it a more subtle look. 

I liked the color of the designer paper from the new Shades of Spring collection but thought the floral design was a bit distracting from the photo and text so I added an overlay to tone it down. 

Here is a short tutorial of what I did. 

1. Open a new project (in this case a 5X5 album) and choose “create your own” and “blank page”.

2. Add the brown Shades of Spring dsp as a background.

3.  Next click the “add as Page Layer” box and add the same dsp to the project. 

4.  Double click on the layer and drag the crop box to enlarge the crop area until it is large enough to cover the entire 5X5 background square. 

5. Position the second layer over the first.

6. Reduce the opacity to desired level – in this case to 30 giving a softening effect to underlying paper.

Here are the before and after shots of the paper – just enough change to keep the background paper from overpowering the main focal image.

Before:

After:

I really like this simple subtle change and plan to experiment with other background papers to see what they look like using this technique.