Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Digital Scrapbooking

Credits:
Papers: Pillowgirl
Template: Lindsay Jane Designs
Font: LOT Sassy


If you have a digital camera and enjoy taking pictures, you may have hundreds, if not thousands of digital photos stored on CDs, unseen by anyone, unless viewed on the computer. Whether captured digitally or on film, pictures are made to be shared and enjoyed.

Printing and framing your photos is great, but eventually there will be no space left for displaying them. Another thing you can do with your pictures so that they can be easily enjoyed is to put them into digital scrapbooks. If you Google "digital scrapbooking" you will find all the information you need on how to do it, many free
page backgrounds and elements to use, pre-made pages into which you insert your own photos, as well as beautiful kits you can download for a reasonable price. Everything in the layout above, except for the pictures of my great-grandsons, was found online as a 'freebie'.

You will need a graphics program of some sort, a computer,
your pictures and a way to transfer them to the computer, a printer, ink and photo paper (if you plan to do your own printing), and a scrapbook for holding the pages.

Two popular programs of many available that you can use for digital scrapbooking are Adobe Elements and its big brother, Adobe Photoshop. A few others that can be used are Corel Paint Shop Pro, Photo Impact, Serif DrawPlus or PhotoPlus. The Gimp, which is similar to Photoshop, is free online. FotoFusion is a very nice program designed especially for digital scrapbooking, though it doesn't have the image editing capabilities of some of the other programs.

If you are creative you can use any of the above programs (limited ability in FotoFusion) to make your own page backgrounds and elements. Add your images, print the pages out yourself or have them printed professionally and display them in vinyl sleeves in scrapbooks. Some common sizes available are 6 inch x 6 inch, 8 x 8, 8 1/2 x 11, and 12 x 12.


"As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity,
I see something special and show it to the camera.
A picture is produced.
The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.
Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve
the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay."

~ Sam Abell ~


3 comments:

Pillowgirl said...

Oh I love the layout! And you give sucha good intro to Digital Scrapbooking. Thank you for helping to spread the word and for showing me your site! I am off to expore it now :)

Anonymous said...

Now you can do online digital scrapbooking @ http://www.ScrapbookGenerator.com (no software, no cost, no signup, no mess). Simply upload a photograph, choose a basic layout and add some 3D WordArt.

Sue Joan said...

Love your photo blog... such beautiful photos. I am doing digital scrapbooking with lumapix.com fotofusion. It is not the most powerful program but very easy to use. Love your blog and your hints!