Artsy Layered Template 107 http://www.oscraps.com/shop/Artsy-Layered-Template-No.-107.html
Original Fotoblendz No. 12 http://www.oscraps.com/shop/Original-FotoBlendz-No.-12.html
Magic Rabbit green background paper http://www.oscraps.com/shop/ArtPlay-Palette-Magic-Rabbit.html
Hipster Plumes Fotoblendz6 http://www.oscraps.com/shop/Hipster-Plume-FotoBlendz-No.-6.html
Crazy Life Button http://www.oscraps.com/shop/ArtPlay-Palette-Crazy-Life.html
Looped Urban Threadz 1 http://www.oscraps.com/shop/Looped-UrbanThreadz-No.1.html
Button Threadz http://www.oscraps.com/shop/ButtonThreadz-No.-1.html

Sometimes I like to use a template just for a background, to jumpstart the design of a page. That was what I did here. I dragged the template to a new layer and positioned two Fotoblendz from the Original Fotoblendz set onto the pageone big and one smallerand clipped in the photos. Then I adjusted the levels of the photos so that they sort of matched, relying on various opacities of the Soft Light blending mode to make the contrast somewhat uniform. Where the faces were too dark, I covered them with stains and paints from the template and experimented with blending modes until I got a bright effect (see below). Necessity is the mother of invention.

I pulled in the background paper just to get an idea of how color would affect the layout.

To soften the hard edges of the big photo, I separated the Hipster Plumes from the Fotoblendz (they come in layers!), colored them green with a fill layer, and positioned them over anything I wanted to hide.

At this point, all the layers of paint, stain, and texture that had come with the template were on the bottom of the layers panel. So I took each one and moved it up, a bit at a time, to see what effects I could get. Some of the paint layers, on different blend modes added quite a bit of depth to the layout and even allowed me to lighten dark spots on the big photothis was a fun part of the process of tweaking the composition. At the end I recolored a few layers yellow just to get some diagonal movement, and embellished with the buttons and Threadz.

The motto of this story: You can save a lot of time by starting with a template!