Sunday Helper - Merging Templates

One of the coolest things about digital scrapbooking is that everything can be tweaked, changed, erased, merged, blended, or transformed.  You can change the color of an element or adjust the texture and brightness of papers.  Today we're going to talk about merging 2 templates together.  Sometimes when you're looking through all the templates you have in your stash, you might want to blend pieces from 2 different templates together.  Let's take a look at 2 Scrap Orchard Template Tuesday examples.

I like the vertical paper strips and photos on this template but would like something more splashy for the background.

This template has fabulous starburst stripes and I'd like to use all these stripes for the background in the first template.  So let's take the best of both these templates and blend them together.

To get started, open up both templates.  To quickly copy and paste across images, I'll need to "cascade" the images into the active window.  You can do that in one of 3 ways.  On the left side, you can double click on the file name.  In the middle you can click on Window/Images/Cascade.  On the right side, you can double click on the little button with the 2 rectangles stack on one another.  

All 3 of these ways will cascade your open images and line them up into small image boxes in your active window panel.  You can grab each window and move them around a little bit to see what's inside better.

Now let's get our first template ready and positioned where we want these new layers to go.  If you single click on the first template, it will bring up all the layers into the layers palette.  I'm selecting the bottom background layer.  All the new layers that will be pasted in will be positioned directly above this layer.

Let's go to our second template and highlight all those paper strips that we want copied.  Now simply drag those highlighted layers and drop them onto the first template.  You'll need to move the grouping around a little bit to position them from edge to edge.  To exit the cascade mode, you can double click on the file name and it will return that file as the single image in the active window.

Voila! I've got a brand new merged template to start scrapping with.  

There's so many fun ways to merge pieces together in the digital scrapping world.  Have fun experimenting this week!