How did I do this?

seattleddc,

We make available to our members a list of sites offering stock photos (free and for purchase). 

www.photoshopelementsandmore.com/thread/2076/stock-photos

You may want to start with those sites offering photos in a format which supports background transparency such as PNG. For example, Snipstock. A quick search of "baseballs" yielded these results.

www.snipstock.com/search?q=baseball&order=&imgType=png&category=&page=2

pixabay.com/images/search/baseball%20silhouette/

I kinda like silhouettes to fill in spaces. Especially on a project like yours, where you already have many photos for graphics to compete with. 

Pixabay offers free graphics, photos, clip art - but be careful because interspersed are graphics you must pay for. It’s easy to tell, though. When you click on a graphic, it will say “free” or list a price.

If the silhouette (or any other graphic/clipart) is a jpg instead of a png, select the background and delete. To drop something on a project and not have a box of white around it, it will need to be a png with transparency around the object.

To get transparency from a jpg, look to the layers panel, if it says “background” it will first need to be changed to a regular layer. Drag lock to trashcan and it will turn into layer 0. (If you delete on a background layer, the result of your deletion will be the background color, not transparency so changing a background layer to a regular layer is step one.).




Select the area around the graphic (I prefer the magic wand for this type of selection) -  and hit delete.  You will know you did this correctly if the result is the checkerboard that denotes transparency. 

Once the background is deleted, you can save the clip art as a png for future use.

You can also use blending to make a jpg graphic “blend” into your project, but it’s often cleaner to use a png.  

Here's part of a layout using silhouettes 

So this is where I am at so far.  I thought about incorporating a silhouette, but I thought it looked too similar to the actual photos.  I used this baseball graphic, but I noticed it turned a couple of the seams black.  I need to go back through and make sure all of the drop shadows on the names match.  Other than that, I still need a few more pics of the kids.  Thoughts?  Be honest.

I see you have incorporated a very thin stroke frame on each photo now. It’s looking good. Unlike Janice I don’t mind gradients as backgrounds but I agree with her in feeling that the light text doesn’t work so well against the light part of the gradient. I also would reduce the opacity of the shadows as they are a bit strong.

The baseball graphic doesn’t look great either IMHO. Janice’s suggestion of putting the Baseball text on one side and the Date on the other side in place of the baseball graphic sounds good to me. Again it’s how you feel about all this that counts. We all have our own ideas, likes and dislikes and there is no wrong or right here.

you may just want to add your team logo

I was thinking about the background and thought that maybe a photo of a lovely blue sky might look good. This one I've used here is available in the Graphics tab within PSE. I just gave it a touch of HSL to bring out the blues a bit more and a levels adjustment to brighten the clouds.
Images from pixabay, kisspng and yopriceville