Digital Scrapbooking

What is digital scrapbooking? Most people, when they think of scrapbooking, think about photos, die cuts, stickers and other bits and baubles laid out on a large piece of paper, either in a book or as an individual page. But, as computers have infiltrated the rest of our lives, they’ve also changed the way some people craft.

Clip art is often used in digital scrapbooking.

Digital scrapbooking or computer scrapbooking is when scrapbook pages are laid out with the help of a computer program. The pictures come from a digital camera or are scanned in, manipulated and combined with digital graphics, borders, text and more.

The pages can then be printed at high resolution on a good quality color printer and pasted into a traditional scrapbook, or you can just store them on your computer or make a CD or DVD of your memory pages that you can share with family members and friends all over the world.

There are several computer programs out there that make digital scrapbooking possible. The most popular programs are Microsoft Picture It!, Adobe Photoshop and JASC’s Paint Shop Pro.

These programs allow crafters to manipulate photos, crop out people or cut out the backgrounds, change colors, add text, borders, graphics and more. All of the programs have a learning curve, and it can be difficult to get the program to do exactly what you want it to do. If you have a lot of experience with Photoshop or another program, you should use the program for your scrapbooking instead of buying a new program.

If you are in the market for a digital scrapbooking program, some of the easiest programs to use are those put out by Hallmark, Ulead, HP and CK. With names like “Scrapbook Studio” and “Scrapbook Assistant,” these programs are designed especially for digital scrapbooking. They are easy to learn and don’t cost a lot of money, but they aren’t great in terms of flexibility or doing all the tricks that some of the higher-end photo manipulation programs will allow.

Those programs, such as Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Corel Draw and Ulead PhotoImpact, tend to have a higher learning curve but also allow you to be more creative once you figure out how to do what you want to do. These programs are more expensive, but also more versatile, as you will be able to use them for applications other than scrapbooking.

For the middle of the road in terms of difficulty, price and flexibility, Microsoft Digital Image Pro is a good choice. It’s not as expensive as Photoshop and it has more features than the scrapbook-only programs. It’s also not as hard to learn as some of the other programs.

Whatever program you use (and you can really use almost any program, including Microsoft Word, but it won’t make for fancy pages), to get started you open a document and import your picture or pictures that you want to use on the page. If you don’t have a digital camera or want to use older pictures, you can scan them.

Then add a background texture or color, frames or borders, a headline and text, clip art or other digital embellishments, even drop shadows around pictures of things that would be three dimensional if the layout were not digital. You’re only limited by your creativity and understanding of the program you are using.

As mentioned about, you can print your scrapbook pages on photo paper or other high quality stock using your home computer if you have a good printer. Or you can take the files to a copy shop and have them printed (opt for acid free paper and ink if you can find it, as the pages will last longer that way). Then you can put the pages in a scrapbook or frame individual pages.

Or you can leave the files on your computer, e-mailing individual pages to friends and family or compiling CDs or DVDs of whole digital scrapbooks. Keep an archive of your pages and update your storage method as new media appears.

You could also build a website dedicated to your digital scrapbooking. Friends and family could visit the site, maybe even add comments about the pages if you set it up that way. And then you can see your pages wherever you have access to the Internet.

There are numerous sites on the Internet dedicated to digital scrapbooking. Here are a few to get you started:

• ScrapbookFlair
• Scrapbook Bytes
• Digital Scrapbook Place
• Photomix
• Scrapbook Graphics

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