It is that time again ..... for Ali Edwards week in a life ... looking forward to it this year with a decent iPhone camera for when we are out and about... also hoping my kids decide to contribute some photos.
I will as in years past use the digital templates Ali has. There are two options the 6x8 and letter sized ones. I chose the 6x8 because I liked the full sized title for each day but most likely I will resize them to A4 and print them in a photobook at my favourite print lab which now has an open to the public branch called nu shots. I love to use templates when making photobooks as it makes it quick and easy.
Here is a look at the templates:

So I have a few photoshop brushes... a few too many for my 4 1/2 year old computer that just couldn't cope ... was running too slow (better after I upgraded the RAM but still too slow) and lets face it I work full time and spend the rest of the time acting as taxi driver running for my girls so simply don't have the time to wait 5 minutes for the brushes to load....  I figured there had to be a better way, so I googled it and I found it.... creating sets... something that I am sure they teach in photoshop classes but wasn't in my photography photoshop books.... but let's face it .... I use digital brushes for my photo books and PL ... not to edit photos.
So here goes.... possibly the logest post ever... because a few asked..
1.  click on the brush tool.
 
2. click to see all brushes available - (open brush preset picker)

3. Click the little wheely thing, that gives you viewing options for brushes.

Here you want to scroll down until you get to replace brushes, and click on replace brushes.
4. It will bring up a pop up window like this (I have blacked out some of my file name favourites)
In the pop up box navigate  to where the  first set of brushes you wish to load are.
Choose the brushes (click on them) and click open.
Brush files are identifiable by the little brush icon next to them.

5. It will load the brushes into your brush picker. This method replaces your existing brushes with the new ones. (But don't worry as long as you have  the original ones saved they are not lost - no need to save default photoshop ones.)

6. But ofcourse I have more than one set of studio calico christmas brushes - so now to load the rest. There are a few ways to do this - here is one way.
Click on the wheely thing - scroll down to load brushes and click.

7. Navigate to where your next lot of brushes are, click to select and then click open.

8. Repeat process until you have loaded all of the brushes that you want.
Mine are all in a file marked sc christmas - so I cheated clicked on the drop down box - which gave me my last visited folers, clicked SC Christmas to navigate back to that folder and worked my way down the liat loading all of the brushes. (Again blacked out folder names, not important.)

9. My loaded brushes looked like this:

AKA - A great big mess.... and I won't use some of them so now I am going to organise them in preset manager -
click the wheely thing - scroll down to preset manager - click on the preset manager
(You could also have loaded your brushes straight into the preset manager I didn't - no reason.)
10. the preset manager will open.
To delete an individual brush - click on the brush you wirh to delete - right click - it will bring up options rename brush / delete brush - scroll to delete brush and click.
You right click on a mac track pad by clicking with two fingers.

If you want to delect more than one brush at a time you have two options.
- hold the command key down - click on each brush you wish to delete.
OR - if all of the brushes are in a row click on the first brush, hold the shift key down, then click on the last brush - it will select the whole section.
Once you have selected all the brushes you want to delete - click the delete button on the right.

11. In the preset manager you can also move the brushes around.
I moved mine so similar brushes were together, the ones I wasn't sure I would use at the bottom.
Again you can select multiple brushes by
- holding the command (ctrl) key down and then click and drag the brush/es to where you want.
- using the shift key to select a sequence, click on the first brush in the set, hold shift key, click and drag to where you want it.

12. Once you have it just the way you want you need to save it.
Click on the first brush in the set, hold the shift key down, click on the last brush in the set.
Then click on save set in the panel on the right had side of the preset manager.


13.. It will open up a box so you can navigate to where you want to save the set.

I have mine saved in ->digital scrapbooking ->photoshop brushes -> sets
Each set has a different name - I called this one SC Christmas 1 (because I already had SC Christmas - but I will combine them)
Name and click save.
14. Now one more step makes life easier - you need to make it so that photoshop can 'see' your sets brushes folder. You do this by creating an alias inside the photoshop brushes folder.
First locate the photoshop brushes folder (I am on a mac - not sure of the exact steps on windows)
Open a finder window -> Click on applications in the left hand pane  -> double click icon to open (I have photoshop cc but it works the same for all versions)
Inside there should be a folder marked presets -> click on presets folder to open.

In the presets folder click on the brushes folder to open.

Once the brushes folder is own you want to open a new finder window.

You do that by selecting file -> new finder window from the top of your screen (when you are in the finder)
In the new finder window navigate to where you saved your photoshop brushes set (so mine was: digital scrapbooking -> photoshop brushes -> sets)
Right click on the 'sets' folder (Remember you can right click on a mac track pad by clicking with two fingers)
Scroll down through the options to 'make alias' and click.

It will create an alias in the current folder.


You simply drag and drop that alias into the brushes folder (in your version of photoshop.)

And all the sets that you have in your digital scrapbooking sets folder will be visible in photoshop.
You only need to do this step once - because once you create a 'sets alias' in your brushes folder - photoshop can see every brushes set that you put into that folder.
but
You will probably have to resart photoshop to be able to see them.

15. So how does this help me?
Well if you go back to the earlier screen shot of the brush preset picker - and click on the wheely thing.

all your sets will be visible.  (you can see I have set up sets that contain days of the week months of the year, and I have all the photoshop default sets too.)
You can just click on whichever set you want to bring up.
It will come up with this little box

click ok and it will replace the brush set.
If I decide that I want to work with a different brush set - say the AE christmas brush set (I set it up following the same procedure) - all I have to do is go back into the brush picker, click the wheely thing and select AE christmas brushes and it will replace the SC BRUSHES with my AE christmas sets.

So last year I decided to make a photobook about our holidays in July. Since the girls mostly visit their dad in the fist week of the holidays it ended up being only the second week.This is the result:


To make it a bit easier and because I have neither the time energy or creativity to do it myself I used these:

and this:

but the company I used to print only prints A4 size not 8x11 so I added a border at the top and the bottom so it would fit the template.
Here are a few of my favourite pages:



ok so that was my favourite day not page.

and heres a look at all of Sunday:


and

Sorry they are not brilliant photos but you get the idea. (And lightroom keeps making everything darker then it actually is)

 I absolutely love how it turned out, the quality of printing, lay flat pages and everything about it, although it took ages. (It looks better in real life
so I guess you are wondering why post this today?
1. Well I saw this

And couldn't help but think how much easier this one will be to convert to a4 size.
2. I wanted to share with my friend ... as we are both doing (or supposed to be doing) project 12, although her photos are probably way more creative and better than mine. I plan to do something like this with my photos... I figure I still have 8 months to decide on exactly what. I may even use a variation on the template above.
3. I was kinda hoping that it would give my my brother a move along with those photos, so I can take forever to start and finish the photobook I that I promised of this:

little darling. Isn't she beautiful!
And just because here is a preview of April 12 -

Bet you can't guess where we went on April 12.
Iroronically there were no clouds in the sky that day... but then clouds don't really like fun parks or the show - unless of course they are Disney Land.
And I got in trouble taking that photo. You aren't allowed to use cameras. I'd like to know who made that silly rule!

Yesterday instead of windsurfing at the holiday program the girls did Stand up paddle boarding.

Turns out that full sun and hats are not really condusive to great shots...even if they are funky new hats she got for Christmas 

she was sitting here because they had to get down low in order to make it under the pier..... silly E went under the lowest part in this shot so she had to be almost flat to make it without hitting her head.

At the end of the day E told me it was sooooo much fun, even better than windsurfing!

Unfortunately because it was calm and way easier  than windsurfing they were also further out in the bay, most of the time behind the boats in the harbour. That made it really hard to get photos, let alone decent ones.

So I stood on the pier and waited until they came in sight.... it turns out that there was only once when they were coming directly at me.... but just as I was about to get a really good shot of Ac....

Of course at this point I started laughing.... so hard that I just couldn't get a decent shot after that..

turns out that even  awesome ai servo and 1/ 6400 can't deal with camera shake from laughing!

She said later.... that she stood too far back for her weight....

I might point out that I am not a completely bad mother and it is quite shallow in most of this area.

And I wasn't the only person laughing as she slowly slid into the water!

Later as we were driving home she says to me..."I finally worked out what SUP stands for" "Stand Up Paddle boards".....I might point out that is after 3 weeks!!! 

And just because:

The seriously Mum must you take ANOTHER photo of me look; I am 13 you know.

the hair colour courtesy of Ireland's left over sun in.

You won't see that delightful fringe she cut herself anymore, the hairdresser fixed it today, it is now layered at the front, and just because A had layers E had to have them too. She was exstatic when the hairdresser told her how to make her hair look more curly.....and it worked!

That one is from Ikea a few weeks back.