Take a Grand Tour of the Travel Template Set

From the Manual

40 double page grayscale templates are included for this class.

No Order

  • Template 01 is intended to be the first page of the album.
  • Template 40 is intended to be the cover of the album.
  • The rest of the templates can be used in any order.

Color and Page Coding

  • Each photo clipping mask is color coded in red.
  • NOTE: Older versions for PS and PSE do not offer the ability to view color coding or apply it.
  • Each layer is labeled and contains a layer style.
  • There are extra layers to indicate which photo masks are on the left side of the two page spread and which are on the right side.
  • The photo masks are in order in the layers panel as they appear on their respective pages.

Keep the Guide in Mind

  • Each template contains a guide to indicate the center of the double page spread.
  • This line will not appear on a JPG version of the page and it will not appear on a printout of the page.

Made to Mingle

  • You do not have to plan for the gutter.
  • This template set was designed to utilize the benefits of a lay flat album.
  • Many of the clipping masks travel across the grid.

Clipping Masks

  • All photo clipping masks in the templates are vector shapes.
  • They do not loose quality when resized or stretched.
  • Every clipping mask includes a layer style that contains a small inside stroke outline in black.
  • Some clipping masks are intended to travel off the page.
  • When saving the templates as JPEGs, flatten the image first.

Journaling Lines

  • Journaling lines are included on most every template.
  • Watch the journaling video for additional details.

From the Transcript

The template set included in the download for this class contains forty double-page spreads. Besides the first and the last template of this set, which are designed to be the first page of an album and the cover page of the album, respectively, the remainder of the templates have no order about them. You should feel free to use them in whatever order you wish. You can duplicate, edit, and re-position the templates and the template pieces as much as you’d like.

When opening one of the templates, one of the first things you should notice is the Layers panel. Each photo clipping mask is color-coded in red. Unfortunately, older versions for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements do not offer the ability to view color coding or to apply color coding. Also, each layer is labeled and contains a layer style, which I’ll talk about in just a second.

To help you and me keep organized, there are also extra layers to indicate which photo masks are on the left side of the two-page spread and which are on the right side. I’ve also done my best to keep the photo masks in order in the Layers panel as they appear on their respective pages. Each template in this set also contains a guide to indicate the center of the double-page spread. This line is not going to appear on a JPEG version of the page and it’s not going to appear on the printout of the page. The line is simply there as a reminder of where the center of the page is.

So then you may be wondering, do you need to plan for a gutter or that part of the album to be hidden inside the binding? I would say no. This template set was designed by me to utilize the benefits of a lay flat album. In this kind of album, there is no gutter. In fact, you should notice that many of the Clipping Masks on the template pages actually travel across the binding or the center. 

This design technique is used to make the two-page spread feel like one large page. It brings unity to the page. This could also be called "mingling". Not all templates mingle, however. So, if you do not like that look or plan to have two different subjects on one two-page spread, then utilize the templates that do not mingle across the binding.

And here is another thing. All the shapes, or photo clipping masks, in the templates are vector shapes, which simply means they have not been simplified or rasterized from their shape form. This is good news for you because this gives you the ability to customize without the loss of quality. Everything will stay clear and crisp, regardless how many times you skew a shape from its original form. You should also notice that every vector shape inside each one of the templates includes a layer style that contains a small inside stroke outline in black. This gives the entire album unity and classiness.

If you’d like to change or remove this layer style, I’ve included a video showing how to do that. And here is something else to watch out for. For photo clipping masks that come in contact with the edge of the template document, the vector shape actually travels off the document boundaries. This is so that the stroke outline does not show on the edge of the page. Instead, it is intended to look like the photo in its entirety travels off the page. And because the clipping masks are vector images, cropping the document will not get rid of the overlap, and that’s a good thing. But if you do not flatten the image before saving it as a JPEG, the shapes will be rasterized then cropped, which results in the stroke showing on the edges.

And finally, when I created my gift album, I was only given photos and paper memories, no journaling. But, I wanted the recipient of my book to be able to add journaling to the album after it was gifted. For that reason, I included journaling lines on almost every template. If you’d like to change the lines as they are shown, or replace them with typed journaling before you print, watch the journaling video on how to do that. So, now that you got an overview of what’s included in these templates, let’s move on to putting them to work.

Complete and Continue