Photo Cupcake Toppers

This post is sponsored by Adobe Photoshop Elements. All opinions are 100% mine!

I’m getting so excited for Valentine’s Day! It’s a favorite holiday at our house, and we have some really fun family traditions to help us celebrate.  Starting February 1st and through the 14th,  I leave a little treat on each family member’s plate–something simple just to let them know how much I love them. Cupcakes are always a hit, so I created these darling Photo Cupcake Toppers with my kids’  pictures on them, and I love how they turned out!

I just love using pictures, and they’re perfectly adorable on top of these cupcakes.  Best of all, this is a super easy project  thanks to  Adobe Photoshop Elements, and I’m going to show you how! They would be perfect for any kind of celebration–birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays.  Think how fun they would be for a classroom party!

PHOTO CUPCAKE TOPPERS

 

SUPPLIES:

-white cardstock

-cardstock

-scissors or circle punch

-double stick tape

-regular tape

-paper straws

-Adobe Photoshop Elements 15 (free 30-day trial!)

 

DIRECTIONS:

Whenever I’m using photos, I always start in Photoshop Elements. It’s so easy to quickly make the edits I need to give my pictures a little boost. Whether it’s removing red eye, brightening, or making it less fuzzy,  just a couple of clicks makes a huge difference for each picture.

I like to start in Guided Mode with one of my favorite options, Perfect Portrait, which is under the Special Edits tab.

I always zoom in on the part of the photo I’m editing, and since I’ll be cropping out my daughter’s face and head for these cupcake toppers, that’s what I was focusing on.  The zoom tool is right above the picture, and all you need to do is click and slide to one side or the other.

The first thing I edited on my daughter’s face was her teeth.  She has some fluoride spots that she’s a little self-conscious about, so I always go in and whiten them up.  It’s SO easy!  Just select Whiten Teeth, then click on the areas you would like to whiten.

The next thing I like to do in Perfect Portrait is brighten the eyes.  Sometimes I take pictures where the light hits just right in the eyes, but a lot of times the sun just didn’t cooperate with me, so I need to get in there and brighten them up. After you select Brighten Eyes, It’s literally just two clicks–one on each eye!

My next stop is the Basics tab, where I can do a few other edits to really make my photo pop. There are a lot of editing options here—you can quickly and easily rotate and straighten your photo, take care of any cropping and resizing, brighten, add contrast, and more.

If you have a picture that’s a little fuzzy and not quite as clear as you’d like it to be, the Sharpen tool is your friend. Talk about simple…just use the slider to sharpen as much as you need.

Brightness and Contrast was my next step, and it’s what deepens the color (contrast) and adds brightness to a darker photo.  Once again, all you need to do is move the slider for each of them, until you achieve your desired effect.  You can see how much I did for this photo below…

Once you’re finished editing your photo, the last step you might want to consider is resizing your photo. If you plan to post your photo online, often you are held to certain size restrictions, and if you are printing your photo, you probably need it to be a specific size.  It’s SO easy to do!  Select web or print first, then a size option.  I like to input my own width and height, so that’s what I usually choose. Then I can type in the exact size I want it to be.  (If you choose Web, then it will ask for pixel size instead of inches.)

I often insert my pictures into Word for printing, so I resize my pictures in Elements, and then it retains that size when it goes into Word.

After I finished this photo, I repeated this process with photos of the rest of my kids, then I inserted the photos into a new Word document for printing. Go to Insert > Photo > Picture from File, then browse for the picture you just saved.

Once your images have been inserted, print them on to white cardstock, and cut out the circle photos in your desired size (my photo circles are 2 inches).  I actually cropped the photos into circles in Adobe Photoshop Elements (tutorial coming soon), but you don’t have to…you can use a circle punch or trace a glass and cut out with scissors so you can get the same size for each photo.

I used my Silhouette to cut out scallop shapes out of colored cardstock– sized just bigger than my photos, at 2.5 inches.  If you don’t have a Silhouette, you can use a scallop punch, or even use just scissors and a traced glass to make a circle just larger than your photo circle.

Adhere the photo circle to the cardstock background using double stick tape.

Use regular tape to attach a paper straw to the photo. Trim the straw to your desired length.

So easy and super cute!

I added one little extra…I printed “love” on kraft cardstock, then added it to my paper straws.  It’s perfect for Valentine’s Day! You can change the word depending on what you’re celebrating, you could even put someone’s name.

I can’t wait to surprise my kids with these on Valentine’s Day!

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