Digiscrapping

I've had a few questions about my digital scrapbooking - so I thought I'd just share a little about why and how I do it. For me, digiscrapping is first of all, a fun creative release. I love playing with my photos on the computer and seeing the final result on a beautiful scrapped page. I love not having to buy tons of supplies, and not having to store them afterwards. I also love being able to start a page, save it when I need to stop, and come back to it later without hauling papers, glues, photos, and all that extra stuff out every time.

So, what I use is Photoshop CS. Most of my papers and digital stamps are free downloads from the internet. This is how I made my "Terracota Soldiers" layout: I first open all the photos I want to use in Photoshop, and do any photo editing - cropping, color correction, etc. Then I open a new document. I am still scrapping 8.5 x 11 pages, so I create a new file at that size, 300 dpi. I start dragging my photos onto the page, resizing as I go and playing around with page placement. Then I look at the colors in my photos and decide what color scheme I want to use. I liked the green in Cailin's shirt, so using the eyedropper tool, picked out a green from her shirt that I was happy with, and used the paint bucket tool to fill the background with the green I chose. Then I chose some accent pattern papers from a free kit from Shabby Princess. I just cut and paste from these digital papers to my layout. Next I type in my journaling and play with fonts and color. My page was looking like it needed a little something extra, so I browsed through my digital brushes and found those cute circles that I haven't used before. I think I downloaded those from here, but you never know. I pick up brushes all over. These are fun, because they are just like a digital stamp. I can change color, opacity, size and play, play, play. When I'm happy with my pages, I check spelling, make sure everything is lined up, then save my original Photoshop file to my hard drive. I can now make as many copies of my page as I want. One for me, one for grandparents, one for the kids - love it. I have access here to a nice large format printer. I just print on glossy photo paper and slide into a page protector in a big 3 ring album. In the future I plan to use a site like Shutterfly to make custom hard bound books. They are very reasonably priced and have a great reputation. I will only miss the instant gratification of printing my page up the moment I finish!