pixie garden tray: the photos

my project today on the pixie dust paperie blog is a very cool (well i think it is, lol!) tim holtz printer's tray. i used this month's gorgeous MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM kit and a whole bunch of photos of my mother's garden to fill it up!

there are lots more pictures of the tray on the pixie blog, including detail shots of the papers & embellishments i used, and photos of the pull-out booklet that is housed in the middle section of the far right of the tray, and i hope you'll check them out! meanwhile, over here i thought i'd talk about the photos a little bit, and show how i formatted them to fit the spaces in the tray.

i measured each section of the tray, and made a grid in printshop (my favorite graphics program) which i used to size and crop the pictures. this way i could move things around until i had an arrangement i liked in terms of shapes, colors, etc. when i was happy with the proportions, i did a test print on plain paper, just to check that color and lighting were good. which is when i noticed the "problem": the photos were full of dark saturated colors, and almost all of the green shades were on the "blue side". whereas the tray and the pink paislee butterfly garden papers i planned to use were much more faded in tone, with greens very much on the "yellow side". it didn't *CLASH* exactly, but it wasn't ideal. this is exactly why i test print; things can look quite different on the screen!

i used photoshop to adjust the saturation downwards, and change the hue from blue to more yellow. you can see the difference in the two screen shots above, but actually, irl, it was even more dramatic. something else i did in the "cropping" process was change the orientation of a couple of pictures to fit better in the frame. for example this rose, which i wanted to use in the top left corner was not only "portrait" orientation, the flower was on the right hand side, and i thought in this case i'd like to reverse that. i did so using the "flip: horizontal" command in the rotate menu.

and now, since the spaces in the tray are quite small, i thought you might like to see the originals of some of the pictures. again you can see that most of them only needed the color adjustments i talked about above, but a few needed to be cropped quite a bit to fit their "slots"

i found that when working with the small "frames" in the tray (the smallest being only 1.5" square!) it was best to stick with bold closeups, and crop them quite tightly.

for the slightly larger spaces, mid-ground shots worked well, although you'll notice again that i did at least a little cropping to fit.

the biggest spaces in the tray were nearly full-sized standard photo sized, and thus could be filled with almost anything, because at that size you can "read" a lot more detail!

i saved the most general photos for the pull-out booklet, since i knew they'd get the most attention and the closest looks. that gave me ten more 3.5 x 5" vertically oriented spaces to fill, but trust me, i have *PLENTY* of great shots yet, and at some point i'd like to compile them in a project that's more comprehensive. maybe a minibook of some sort?

in the meantime, you can see the whole tray in greater detail over at the pixie blog, i hope you will enjoy it! ♥