Transcripts
1. How to Create a Pinterest Collage Introduction: Hi everyone. I'm Pauline Molinari. I'm a crafter and a blogger living in Sunny Southern California. I love holiday crafting and creating fun, playful home decor pieces. I love to create fun food crafts or design party printables and cards. I double in hand lettering, I love to paint. I'm the crafty maven of chicacircle.com. My blog journey started by sharing a crafty escapades that I had while raising my daughter to be the creative soul that she is today. It's so great to be able to share something with so many people. The internet is so vast, and one of the biggest traffic drivers to the blog is Pinterest. To get noticed on Pinterest, you have to have ideas in graphic that grab people's attention, and for me, it's my DIY or Do it Yourself, Photo Collage tutorials. I want people to be inspired to pin them and have them repaint over and over again. I'm such a visual person, and if you're anything like me, a picture does it all. I'm going to take you through the process of how I create a photographic DIY collage and tutorial. I'll take you through how I approach and photograph a new craft idea. I'll share some of my own photography tips and tricks, and how I prep and edit my photos, both in Photoshop and on my iPhone. We'll pull it all together and put it into a collage, ready to be put online and pinned on Pinterest. Finally, I'll share how I structure my own DIY blog posts for maximum exposure and for easy reading. What I really want you to get from this class is to take my tips and my tricks and my process and create your own process. After over seven years of blogging and a gazillion photo tutorials later, I want to share what I've learned along the way. It'll be fun. Let's get started.
2. Lesson One Getting Started - Plan your DIY: Let's get started. Let's plan our DIY (Do it yourself). Pick something that you would want to demonstrate to someone. It could be a easy craft idea, could be a homemade gift idea, could be a fun food craft. Or you can actually just replicate what I'm going to show you today. But we're going to make some pretty paper flowers out of just literally colored paper. Then we'll turn them into other crafts after that. I will approach it just like I do when I plan a craft for DIY on my blog and I'll actually take you through at the end, the full post and you'll actually get to see the full post live. When I pick something to demonstrate, I always try and pick something to inspire my audience. My audience are moms, teen, twin girls. That's my little niche. Paper flowers for me is right in my warehouse. I also want to make sure my DIY will stand out Pinterest. I want to make sure it's something colorful, something easy to do, something approachable, something that someone's going to be like. I want to try that. First thing that you're going to need to do is to gather all the supplies that you will need for your DIY, for the paper flowers, I'm going to use colored sheets of six by six paper. This is harder scrapbook paper. You can have double-sided or just colored. You'll need scissors. You'll need a pencil or maybe a chapstick. This is something to roll the paper off are on and you'll need a glue gun. Think about when you photograph your supplies, that your supplies actually we'll look at it in the photograph as well. For instance, I have this basic red pencil that I think is nice and colorful. It could be a basic yellow pencil, but I probably wouldn't want to have this one extra pattern. It's a little chewed up on the end. Think about it. Your photograph is going to show everything. Sometimes I actually, I have about four or five glue guns, but I've saved one that I haven't got paint on all over. I say one that looks good in photographs that I don't use that often and it's perfect for photographing. Secondly, before you start photographing, make sure you've actually done a test project. Make sure you've done it to the very end. Sometimes I'll do a project and I've got it in my head and I'm like, I'll start photographing it and I'll realize, I actually would have done it a little different. I've gone ahead and I've tested and I made some paper flowers, I've made plenty. I know exactly what I'm doing. When I'm ready to photograph. I'm all set and I can do it quickly. Lastly, before you get started, when you're happy with your craft, you know exactly what you're doing. You have all your supplies. Think of the visual appeal. I want to make sure all my crafts are colorful. They're going to stand out on a white background. I prefer to photograph on a white background. I definitely wanted to pick some colorful papers for this craft and I wouldn't have done this same craft with six by six inch white sheets of paper. It just wouldn't have stood out. Think about that in the scheme of things too, how will your finish craft turn out, make sure you're using the best, the most colorful supplies that'll help stand out, help your whole craft stand out in the end, and it'll grab your reader's attention as well. In the next video, we'll talk about how I shoot each of my steps in how I set up my photo studio.
3. Lesson Two Photographing your DIY Project: You've planned out the project that you're going to demonstrate. You've gathered all your supplies or you've gathered the supplies that I've told you for the paper flowers, that I'm going to show you how to make today. Now, we're ready to shoot our steps. I shoot a lot of step-by-step craft projects. Here at my home office, I actually have a photo studio setup at all times. You do not have to go that far, you do not have to have one set up all the time. It depends how often you do this. I will give you a list of the exact supplies that I use in my photo studio just in case you want reference. There are a couple of things that I think are a must. The biggest thing when you're shooting photography is lighting. I recommend a portable photo light with daylight bulbs. Now, the one that I love is this one, this low ego one that I bought off Amazon, I believe it was around a $100. I actually put into two daylight bulbs in here, there's a little switch to turn it on and off. It gives it a nice pop. I use this in every single photograph I take. But if I didn't have this, you can actually engineer your own. In other cases, if I want just a little extra light, I've used just a clip on lamb. Again, I've put in a special day light bulb that I ordered. All of these I ordered Amazon again, I will give you all the links to all the supplies that I use. This is honestly just a piece of tracing paper because the biggest thing about lighting is you want diffuse light and you don't want harsh, harsh lighting, that's going to give you really solid shadows. You want diffuse lighting, even if you're outside, because outside is a great place to shoot as well. If you do have the opportunity to be on a Saturday or an overcast day. Even if you're outside, you don't want direct sun. You do not want that harsh light. I will show you how some of my tricks of how if I'm outside shooting and the sun is out, how I actually diffuse sunlight. I'm going to take you behind the scenes in a second to my photo studio. I'll show you three different setups. There are three places that I suggest that you shoot your photographs. Either in a setup photo box or studio, an area, a quick tabletop next to a window with some sunlight. I'll show you that set up in a second or outside in an overcast day. Again, if it's not overcast and it's sunny, there is one trick that I use to do some diffused sunlight that gives you some nice lighting as well. In just a couple of minutes, if you just take a little planning, you can have a quick inexpensive photo studio. Let me take you through some option. Here's behind the scenes, here is my photo studio. I've got my portable photo box that I actually always have setup. I just have it set up on a small table. I've got my table top light, and I actually like to have some extra lights here. I like light coming from all directions, especially if it's just diffused. I have a DSLR camera that I use on a tripod. I'm not going to go into too much about how to use a DSLR camera, but I will leave you a link. I have an e-book on How to Rock Your Own Craft DIY Photography, and I'll leave you a link in the resources in case you're interested in that. But just know that you do need a high-quality camera be It your iPhone or a DSLR camera. I also mentioned that I like shooting on all white backgrounds, especially my steps. If I'm doing a colorful crafts and I always try to do the most colorful craft. I always have lots of white poster board on hand in case like this one here you probably, I don't know if you can see that it has a little pencil mark or a little paint mark. I'm always getting messy with my crafts and it's an easy inexpensive way to just switch it out. But I also have some colored boards always on hand in case I want to switch it out or add a little color, a little extra color. As I mentioned, this is how I work. I do so much craft photography that I actually have this setup at all times. But let me show you a couple other quick ways that you can set up outside a window or outside. For really quick and inexpensive photo setup, you can take a piece of white poster board, like I said, I like to photograph all my steps on white. Here, I have actually prompted against another tripod, you can use a bookend. I've used a little painters tape. What I've done is I've actually attached it onto a curve. You will actually get a seamless background. This will work if you're crafts are small enough. You can use the photo, the sunlight coming from a window, but most likely you may actually also, depending on where your window is, you might need at least one photo light. This is the cheapest version, this is just a clip on light and I put a daylight bulb in it and I put a piece of tracing paper on just to diffuse it a little bit. You need to plan what time a day you're going to take it, look around your house, when is the best sunlight coming in from a certain window. Here I am in my backyard. I've set up the same poster board that I did inside for a quick down and dirty photo studio. As you can see, it's sunny out today. Your ideal situation is an overcast day. Honestly, if this is your only choice, if you're going outside of this is the best option. But one trick I use, is I have this translucent tray that I use if I'm shooting outside for something. It diffuses the sunlight and it takes away all those harsh shadows. You see the harsh shadow? Put this on. Much better. This is another option and some crafts actually I do like to shoot outside, especially if it's a flower or planter. I try and find the most opportune time during the day or I try and make sure it's overcast. But in a pinch, this could work to. When you have your photo studio setup wherever you are inside by a window, outside in an overcast day or in the shade. There are few things I want you to consider. Try and plan and do your craft and shoot it step-by-step in one sitting. There's the occasional project that I'm doing that maybe the glue needs to dry or the paint needs to dry. But I want to be consisted in my lighting, I literally I'm taking the pictures as I'm doing the project step-by-step. Number 2, make sure to take enough steps. Think about when you're doing your craft, if you were demonstrating to an actual person. Where in your head, where would be a stopping point that you would actually say, now do this. That would be a step make sure you take a picture. It's easier to delete steps in editing process later than to replicate that and trying to step after you've already completed the whole craft. I use a tripod specifically for step-by-step photography because I usually frame up my shot in my photo wherever I'm shooting. Once I've got the first step set, the rest of them can follow suit. Also, sometimes my hands make an appearance and I use the self timer on my camera and I would never be able to do the self timer, touch the craft, use both hands and take the shot. The other thing to consider when doing a DIY photo craft session is I usually, like I said, I shoot all of my steps at once. Then, I usually take a pause and I prepped for my hero or my beauty shot. Those take a little bit more planning and in the next video, I'm going to go through my process in my thinking about how I shoot my beauty shots. Because the steps are great, but you definitely still want to entice your audience to come in and see what they can do with it the beauty shots, that's what their key for.
4. Lesson Three Photographing your Beauty Shot: When I shoot my beauty shot, or my final craft sometimes this can take as much planning as my step by step project. I know this class is about photo collage, but if you are using this in a blog post, your beauty shot can be just as important as your DIY photo collage tutorial. I just want to talk briefly about how I approached my beauty shacks. First, I usually shoot a final image of the finished craft on the same white background, or the same background that I use when shooting all my steps, then I usually take it a step further. I build other crafts on top of that, or I play with backgrounds I do some photo styling. I want to give the craft context. For the paper flower project, I actually off camera made a bunch of paper flowers, and I made this cute little topiary. I actually glued a bunch of paper flowers onto a white foam ball, and I painted a little paint pot. Now, I will shoot this by itself as well, but let's give it some contexts, and let's give it some styling. I want to inspire my audience with pictures of how they can take this one craft, and turn it into something else, or how they can use it in their own home. Now I don't need to show you step by step how I made this paper topiary, because I've already shown you how to make one. But in words, when I put it into a blog post, I certainly can describe I've glued onto a white star foam ball, painted a paint pot, and that's it. The main project in my blog posts was the paper flower. This is just an inspiration of how you can take that a step further. Now what do you do with the paper flowered? Do you turn it into a pin put it on your lapel? Do you put it on a picture frame, etc? For one of the beauty shots for my paper flowers from this cute little tray, I want to pick up some of these colors, so I'm just going to throw a couple of things on here or there. This is cute, put this over, I know it looks dark but honestly if you're in here, the photolizer just making this thing pop. I'm going to look through my camera, and this one I'm shooting inside my photo studio, but I actually may take a couple shots outside as well, and get some natural light on it in the sunlight, and get a little different background. I'm still shooting some beauty shots, and I've come to my backyard table. I love shootings images on the backyard table, you can see the background is this really cool wood green. But if you can tell by my shadow the lighting conditions aren't ideal. My little trick I'm going to use here again is I'm going to pull out my translucent tray, and I'm going to shield some of that sun, and diffuse it, and I should get a beautiful colored shot that I can actually, I'll probably brighten it later. But look at how cool the wood green looks in the background. I love it. Here are some final beauty shots that I took. In the next video, we're going to take all of our step photos, and I'm going to show you how I processed, and edited them.
5. Lesson Four Editing Your Photos in Photoshop: Next up is editing all the photos that we took, all the steps, all the hero shots. Let's do it. I have all my photos imported and loaded onto my computer. I'm a Mac girl, so I load them into iPhoto first from my camera. You can see all the step photos here at a glance. I usually then drag and drop the selected ones into Photoshop all at once. I like to have all my images in Photoshop and all my steps because I like to edit them one at a time and it's easier to keep track and make sure they're all consistent when I have them all open in Photoshop. You really only need basic knowledge of Photoshop to edit your photos in Photoshop. Just a little brightening and color correcting, it can make all the difference in the world. Let's pick our steps. We definitely need a supply shot. Let's see. I like this one. I'm going to drag that one into Photoshop and then Step 1, this looks like a nice bright one. We'll drag that in. Now, we're just starting to cut our paper flowers. Let's pick this one with two hands. Now we're cutting. Let's pick this one. We've cut a whole circle and I want to show that you stop at the end. Just one is about a quarter size circle. Honestly, I think my first one is the best. I have all my images open up in Photoshop. I have all my steps. Let's start with step number 1. The first thing I do is I actually want to get these brighter and I want to make them a little more color corrected. I'm going to open either Command L or Command M. I'm either going to go into levels or to curves or appearance Image, Adjustments, Levels or Curves. I'll show you the quick difference between the two of them. Levels is a quick way to just get some brightness in there. I always pull this slider over to get more whiteness and then I usually pull this slider over to get some of the shadows. This is your graph of where your colors are. Another quick tip is you can use this white eyedropper and select on the background something that should be white. Because we shot this on a white background, the whole background should be white. You can see instantly, it color corrected, it took away the blue haze in the background and it brightened it up. You can also go back if you think you've lost some of your shadows, you can pull this slider back in. That is level. Do the same thing in Curves. Image, Adjustment, Curves or Command M is the keyboard shortcut. You can see we still have this same graph of where our color is. Again, I always pull this slider over to get the brightest to where it starts to dip up then I pull this to where we get to shadows. I still want it brighter. I'm going to select the white dropper tool again and instantly that's even better. They still do the same thing and here's the difference between curves. If I pull any of these colors up and down, it separates them and you can see you can actually go pretty technical with this, but honestly, you want to make it brighter, you make want to make sure the background is white and there's no color hue. Let's start over again. Image, Adjustment, Curves. Let's pull our sliders in. Here we go. I still want some brightness. I usually do though white eye dropper. I want our background. This is going to blow it out too much because I picked a gray area. But right here where I want the white, you can keep clicking around until you get, oops, that one looks good. I want to say yes, let's say okay. The next thing I do is I usually crop my image. As you can see here is where the end of my white poster board i and here's the end of the white poster board here. Let's make sure we just get the portion that we want. I'm going to select it with the selection tool, which is right here and I'm going to go up to Image and Crop. Now we have our full image. Then next thing I do is I'm going to resize it. For my blog, I have a standard size of 650 pixels. I'm going to go to Image, Image Size. Right here, this is already 2784 pixels at resolution of 72 DPI. I have a standard of 650, so I go ahead and change that and I don't touch any of these. You can see the file size went down dramatically, which for the web if you want your images to load quicker, you want the highest resolution, the biggest one, you don't want it too small, you aren't too big. If I left it at this ginormous 25 megabyte size, it would be really tough for any server or any website to load that many images. I've done a standard of 650 pixels on the width, 72 DPI, and we'll say okay, and then I'm going to save it. It looks small here, but believe me, it's going to be fine. Now I'm going to Save As and let's just call this paper Flower Supplies, and we'll put it in a folder that I've already started and Save. I save it as a JPEG, and I usually save it as maximum, the biggest file. Command 0 will bring it to the windows. You can see it's nice and bright, it kept its resolution, now let's go on to Step 2. We'll do the same exact thing. I'm going to do Command M. I'm going to look at where my curves are, I'm going to bring my slider in to bring up the brightness, I don't want to bring it in that much you can see this is all about how bright you want it. If I brought this all the way into here, you can see it's way too dark. But it just needed a little definition. I'm going to hit the white eye dropper tool again and click around until I'm happy. There, that looks pretty good to me. I'm going to say okay. Next is cropping. I'm going to make sure I have all the portion that I need. Image, Crop, and then image size. Let's resize it again. I'll do 650 at 72 DPI for the web and Save As. Let's call this Paper Flower Step 1. Let's put this in our paper flower folder. There we go. JPEG and okay. I'm just going to finish the rest. I'll speed it up and I'll catch you at the other end. We have all of our edited photos. In the next video, I'll show you how I take them out and put them into a beautiful collage.
6. Lesson Five Create Your Photo Collage: Let's use a tool that I'm sure all of you have, your smartphone. When I first started making my collages, I did everything in Photoshop. Photoshop is a super powerful design tool. But what I found is actually an app saves me time. An app can take all the guesswork out of making sure all the step boxes are exactly the same size, all the frames are the same width, etc. I've used many different photo collage apps on my phone for different purposes, but my favorite now, ones that I use for my blog post is pic frame. If you think about it, most collage apps are used for social media. Even Instagram has its own photo collage plugging in its app. But if you're doing longer, photo collages like for a blog post, pic frame has actually the one that's been the most versatile that I've found. I'll take you through how I use it. Let's get started. In the last video, I showed you how I edited all my photos. I save them to a Dropbox folder so I can easily access them from my phone. On my phone in the Dropbox app, I find my images and I download them to my camera roll. Let's speed this up. Just a couple more, then I'll show you some of the cool features of the pic frame app, and then we'll make our collage of my paper flowers craft. Let's open the app. This is what it looks like when it opens. As you can see, there are five pages of different templates. What I love about this app though, is up at the upper right-hand corner, you can pick your photo ratio, your size ratio. One-to-one is obviously a square, but if you pick a two to three in a two-by-two square, two-to-three is going to be completely different, if you pick a two-by-three square. You see how the different squares change sizes? For our photo collage, I actually counted 10 steps that I want to put together. For this, I'm actually going to do two separate photo collages using the template with five box. I'm actually going to use the two templates on the lower right-hand corner for this one. I'll start with building a collage with the first five steps. I've picked my template, and then all I have to do is tap onto the first square and it brings me to my camera roll, I've actually created a folder where I've put all my images, and I just select the first five steps. This app is going to automatically flow them into this template. If they're in ordered than that's great. This one just happens to be in order. The cool thing you can do about this is you can move around the images, you can use your fingers to pinch and increase, up here on the upper right-hand corner in the options. One of the default is just a square, but you can actually put in some corners and some shadows. You can play with this one, I like just the standard white background. Down at the bottom in style. You can actually change the color of the borders. For my style, I like the white borders, but you can change it to whatever color you'd like. Let's say you didn't want to blow it out, you could use a different color. There are many, many options you can do with this app. When I'm happy with my collage, I'm going to save it back to my camera roll by pressing the "Share" on the lower right and then the "Save". Now let's make the collage for steps 6-10. I'll go back to frames, pick the other template, I'll click on one of the boxes, which takes me back to my camera roll, and I'll pick the images for steps 6-10. Let me just select them. There's my five images and they'll load automatically into my template, but they're not in the right order, so we're going to have to fix each of these one by one. So tap on each image that you need to fix, find the image that goes in there, put him in the right order. This usually happens when I reuse a template if I'm making more than one frame in the app, and again, I will adjust all of my images one by one. You can pinch, you can enlarge, you can rotate. This is getting close to let me just noodle a little bit. Paper flower, let's put that right step there, that looks good. Let's fix one last picture. We're going to find step 9, that's it. I'm going to resize it. I think there's just a little bit too much white space to the right of that image, so by pressing and holding on the divider bars on any of the templates, you can actually change the image ratio within the boxes. That's another cool thing about this app. You can also play with some effects of some of the images. Now we already edited our photo, so I'm not going to do that at all. I like this, again, I'm going to Share, I'm going to Save. You can share your collages on social media or by e-mail, but I'm going to save these back to my camera roll, then from my camera roll, I'll put them back into my Dropbox folder before I go. My only complaint about the app is that there's no direct access to share to directly to Dropbox, maybe in an update. Now that I finished my two collages, I'll import them back into Photoshop to add the finishing touches, which I'll show you in the next video.
7. Lesson Six Adding Type and Branding: We are so close to a finished photo collage. I've opened up our two collages that we made on our smart phones that we created through the Pic Frame app into Photoshop. If you remember, I made ours into two different sections since we had 10 steps. I've got the two images open. The first thing I do is I resize again. If you remember, image size. For me, 650 is still my standard. I still keep at 72 dpi. Again, look at how much the image size went down. That's good. Here's the first one. I'm going to do Command 0 to still put it back in the window, image size, 650 then Command 0 to put in the window. Now, I'm going to split these into two different windows so we can see both of them. The next thing I do is I want to add a space where I'm going to put my title bar and I want to join these two together. The first thing I do is I double-click on this, I'm in my layers palette. I'm going to double-click on it and it turns it into a layer. Believe me, it'll make sense in a second. The next one I'm going to do the same thing, turn it into a layer. Now, I'm not going to go to image size this time. I'm going to go to Canvas size. Let's put it in inches because I deal to inches a little bit easier. Right now, this image is 9 by 9 inches. Right now, it's formatted here. I want to increase it and I actually want to double it. If you think about it I'm going to take this one and put it in here so my width is going to stay the same, but my height is going to go to 18. But remember I told you I actually wanted to add a little extra bar. I want to add a color bar or something to put a title in. Let's add two more inches to that. Let's go to 20. I know this is the top of the image, I want all my image to be at the top. Watch what happens. It's going to keep it at the top. I'm going to say, 'Okay" so we're going from approximately 9 by 9 to 9 by 20. I'm going to do Command 0 to put in window again. You see here, I'm going to go on the selection tool. It's on my layer. Now this can move up and down. I'm going to move it down a little bit to save room for a title. Then I'm going to go to my second image and I'm going to drag and drop it right on top of here. It will snap to grid. I'm going to put it right there. Move it up a little bit. Actually, I'll put all the way to the bottom. Then move this layer down and look at that. Look at how gorgeous that looks. Now I can actually get rid of this image and I'm going to say don't save. I'm just going to work in this image right now. Now, I'm going to go up here to my layers palette Command Shift N for new layer. We'll just call this one back row. The way layers work is that you can actually drag and drop and you can put layers in different order. Let's bring the background all the way to the back. I'm going to select the whole working board. I'm gonna do Command all, or you can go Select all. Command A, Select all, you can see here's the dotted line, it tells you where your selection is. Here is where I'm going to pick a color. This first color, if you can see it, is set foreground color and the background color is white. I'm going to click on this and look at a handy eyedropper tool comes up again. Let's pick something that is really going to pop. As you can see, I've got a purple paper here. I think that's the most prominent color in my collage and it came up here. If I keep clicking, if I like a different color, let's see, I think this one. I'm going to say okay. I've selected all, I'm actually going to do, my little trick is I do Command, Delete. But when I do Command, Delete, it's going to pick this back color. Command, Delete. The other way to think of this because I am so in tune to just doing my shortcuts is we still have the background all selected. You can change this. Let's say you wanted to pick a different color. Let's say we wanted to pick, blue. Here's another way to do it. Edit, fill and you can do foreground or background color. Let's try the foreground color, and then it's blue. I actually like the purple better. I'm going to leave it at purple, I did Command Z to undo. Then this leaves enough space for a title. Now it's time to put some type on there. Let's talk titles. I've opened up some of the latest collages or the latest craft DIY that I did. I have some favorite fonts that I use a lot. Honestly, occasionally I change it depending on the special holiday or occasion, but I usually stick to the a couple of favorites for my title treatment and it actually gives my blog images consistency and additional branding. Because when you open up and you see my site, all of the DIYs have a similar look and feel. One trick I do because I tend to use the same title fonts is I open the last collage that I did. Just like I did before where I dragged and dropped these two images together, you can drag and drop any layer from any image in Photoshop to a different image. You can see this is my conversation heart bath bombs, that was the last DIY that I did. I'm going to drag and drop it onto my image. Of course, I always change the colors and the title. I'm going to double-click on the title tool and selects it. Let's call these pretty and we double-click it again. Of course I don't want it red. But honestly, do we want to make it pop with a yellow? Again, any color that you select in Photoshop, it generally gives you an eyedropper tool and you can pick it up straight from your image. Then let's select bath bombs, paper, flowers. Honestly, I think I want that to really pop and we have a lot of white. Let's just pick white. Actually I'm going to add a little bit of space in there. It looked like it was stuck together. Good. Now the F and the L aren't stuck together. One last branding touch that I do is to put a watermark of my blog address at the bottom of all my images. Believe it or not, there are still people who steal images and post them as their own and post them straight to Pinterest. It just helped that my web address is at the bottom of all my blog images. Again, I've got it set here. See it's right here and I'm going to drag and drop. Another thing you can do is you can actually select a color in here. I usually stay in the neutral zone. Let's do a gray and guess what? We're going to learn something about layers because I can tell now why it's not showing up. Going to say, okay, because I bet that's going to be dark enough. Remember how I said the layers, you can switch them. This chicacircle.com, web address was behind that image. I'm going to bring it to the front. Just going to switch up there it is. Then I'll bring it down here and put it center a little bit. I can use my arrow tools to put it exactly where I want. I think that actually looks really good. It's perfect. It's ready to be pinned. Let's save our work. I always save the PSD file or the raw Photoshop file in case I ever need to make changes again. Let's save it as Pretty Paper Flowers DIY. I like to give it a really good long description. We'll put it in the paper flowers folder. There's the PSD file, that is the raw file, the Photoshop file that I can open up and make any modifications. Then I'm going to do a Save As. Now I'm going to save it as JPEG, save. As you can tell in my last DIY that I did, I dragged and dropped and, again, for consistency, I use the same type in all of these. They all have the watermark. I've changed the color, depending on what color it goes on. Sometimes I use the title in a white area in a photo. These are some of my beauty shots that I took for this DIY. Sometimes I actually add an extra little bar or a colored bar and I do it the exact same way that I did here. This is probably what I did. I selected an area and I filled it with a color. These are just some good examples of how I use the same type treatment and watermarks in both my DIY. I use it in all my beauty shots. It's time to wrap it all up and turn this into a stellar blog posts in the next video. Keep watching and I'll show you exactly how I structure each of my blog post.
8. Lesson Seven Structuring a Great Blog Post: You've seen me take photos of my full craft tutorial. We've edited the pictures, we've created a beautiful photo collage. Now I'm ready to turn it into a fantastic blog post. I've given you insight into my photo studio and how my process of editing photos. Now let me give you some insight in the back and then my blog and how I structure a blog post. I've started a new post and I'm just going to title it, will call this Pretty Paper Flower DIY and for me, I like to create a visual outline in my blog post first before I actually start writing the post. I've already pulled all my images into my media library. Everything that I've edited, including the photo collage, including all the beauty shots. Then one by one I'm going to pull them into my post, let's add media first. I like to start with the beautiful beauty image, something that I want to pin as well or hope that my audience wants to pin as well and I usually do one with a title. I think this is definitely really pretty paper flower topiary. Let's start with that one, let's insert it into the post, beautiful and then literally this is me creating my outline but I know I want to write a little text after it but right now I'm just going to write this. Then I'm going to return and I'm going to add another image and this honestly where I jump right into the photo collage. Let's put that one in and this, then I'm just going to go ahead and add some of my other images and see how my blog post is paste. Now I've gone back and where I used to just put placeholders of just this, I've gone back and written my text. I always start with an intro line and then I usually go into what supplies you need for the DIY in between the pictures, then I go into a descriptive form of what you're doing in the pictures. Here are the instructions right underneath the photographic collage, the slider at the top. Then here's my beauty shots and I type in a few lines, a few editorial in between each of the pictures describing what it is or what to do. Here's how I describe how I made the paper flower topiary, I've got some more beauty shots and then I always finish with a couple other, two or three examples of other posts within the site that if they liked this one, if you want to learn more how to make some other crafty flower bouquets checkout these post. Here's where I just put an image and I put a link at the bottom to other posts that they may want to check out. I finished the post with a graphic signature, that's it. I published it, here it is on the site and then here's the coolest thing. Let's look at this post, don't be afraid to pin it to your board right away. I just published it, let's pin it. You can pin it on multiple boards at different times, save it. Let's put it in Chica Circle Projects for now, looks good. Close. I'm going to pin the beauty one and then let's pin the DIY. They usually like to pin at least one of the beauty shots right away and the full photographic collage. Let's pin this one in between craft ideas. Nice, looks great. Let's review the whole post. It looks great. I love it.
9. Final Thoughts: I really hope you enjoyed this class and just a last few words of encouragement. I want you for your class project to try this. Photograph, a DIY, step it out, make a photo collage. I wanna see your collages. If you do have your own blog or a site that you're going to put your DIY on, please leave a link below in the comments. I would love to take a look and pin it on my own P interest boards, and don't forget to check out the extra resources in the class description. I can't wait to see your DIYs. Thanks so much for joining me. You can find me on the web at ChicaCircle.com or comment here and I'll find you. Thanks everyone.
Pauline Molinari, Crafter • Maker • Blogger
