We buy our KnK machines because of the software.  We want the flexibility that it gives us to make any size, any shape, any design.  And that’s great.  We can take any photo and custom make a frame for it, regardless of the size of the photo or object.  But resizing can take lots of time, either on the KnK or the photo itself.  What if we have a lot of photos, and we want them all to fit in the same size frame, so we can have a uniform look to our album?  And we want to make it quick (well, relatively.  We know we spend much too much time with the software…).

Some times we just don’t do projects on our KnKs because it takes too much time.  This was the case with having multiple photos that I wanted to fit all inside the same sized frame.  This post is about how to resize those photos to fit your frame, so that you actually use that KnK to make your project.

For end of the school year I made a scrapbook for an elementary teacher in whose class I do intervention work.  Each child made a note for the teacher, and across from their note was their photo.  I sized the frame to fit my page, and wrapped each child’s name around the frame that their photo was to go in.  So far, simple.

Since I designed the frame in MTC software, I looked at the size of the oval cutout that the photo would show through.  Then I created this same size oval in my photo editing software (I use Photoshop).  Because my oval was small enough to fit two on a 4×6 photo sheet, I duplicated it, and spaced them evenly apart on my software canvas, which I made the same size as the photo paper.  Then I created a layer mask so that I could see layers below the oval shapes, just as if I had a “frame” over it that was the same size as what I had cut with the KnK.

Next I resized all my images at once.  This is important so that when you import over your images they are the proper size and fit.  I did a batch resize in photoshop, and in less than a minute, all my images were the right size.  Last, I created separate layers for each of the two faces, one for each “frame”.  Then I printed them out and cut them in half.

It was way to easy to align the photo within the frame, as I had masked it and printed it out just the way the actual cut KnK frame was.

After that, it was just a lot of manual taping to put the album together.