Beginner's Guide to Digital Scrapbooking

Welcome to this overview and basic guide to the world of digital scrapbooking. Digital scrapbooking is a great alternative - or even addition - to traditional paper scrapbooking.

If you love your paper scrapbooking and don't want to give it up, you can still join the digital revolution. Many paper scrappers don't want to give up the scissors, cutting, gluing, and feel of traditional scrapping. They can purchase digital kits or elements, print them off, cut them out, and use them in their paper layouts. The beauty of using digital in the paper scrapbooking world is that if you need another element or paper, you just print it out. You might also discover that some of the digital elements might be difficult or impossible to find from paper suppliers. So digital scrapbooking is a useful resource for traditional scrappers.

If you want to remain digital throughout the layout process, it's a fun journey and we'll provide you some basic steps. We won't go into all the benefits of digital scrapbooking since we cover that in an article here : Why Digital Scrapbooking? . Instead, we'll jump right into the basic how-tos of digital scrapbooking.

First, you need to have your photos on your computer. If you have a digital camera, you are ahead of the game because most digital cameras come with a way to get the photos to your computer - some even come with software you can use for digital scrapbooking (more on the software later). If you don't have a digital camera, or you are wanting to scrap old photos or slides, then you will need a scanner. For average scanning, you can get decent results with the $100 range scanners. But if you want to also scan 35mm slides and color negatives, you'll need to look at mid-range scanners - most of which are in the $300 range. Scanners in that range also usually come with technology to repair dust and scratches in prints and slides.

Then you will need some software to do your digital scrapbooking. There are more and more options becoming available to the digital scrapper. There are basic cookie-cutter-everything-supplied-but-the-photo packages, to the more advanced software packages that allow you to edit your photos and create layouts in your own style. Here is a PARTIAL list of the software available with the pros and cons of each : Digital Scrapbooking Software Reviews.

Once you have your software decision made, it is time to actually create your layouts! Every program that is digital scrapbooker friendly works on the concept of layers. Imagine the layers in the software program are like layers of paper. If you put a piece of paper with a hole cut out of it on top of a sheet of paper, the bottom paper will show through the hole and be "framed" by the top paper. If you put a transparent sheet on top of a piece of paper, the bottom paper would show through depending on how clear the top sheet of paper was. That's exactly the way layers in a software program work. If you have a background paper as the first layer, you can place your photo in the next layer, put another layer (another piece of "paper") that is clear in the middle on top of that as a frame. You can add another layer to put a digital ribbon or other elements. If you change your mind about any part of it, simply delete that layer and start over. No bemoaning the loss of costly paper or elements. It's all replaceable and changeable in the software program until the layout is printed. In our example, if you decide you'd rather not frame the photo, just delete the layer (our "paper" with the "hole" in the middle) on top of the photo. Some of the elementary software programs won't let you rearrange layers, but most will let you move layers just as you would move sheets of paper. Most of the standard software used for digital scrapbooking allow some sort of drag and drop to add papers, photos, and elements to your layout. You would open (or create a new) document such as a background paper (which is usually a jpg in most digital scrapbook kits). You will notice there is one layer... just the background you opened. To add your photo, you would open the photo into a new document - again, notice there is only one layer in that document. Next you click on the photo with the move tool in your software (usually it looks like crossed arrows or something similar to this : + ) and "drag" the photo over on top of the background image. Now you will see that there are two layers in your background document! Add other layers to the background in the same way. To move, delete, resize, or otherwise affect one of the layers, highlight the layer in the layer palette. That will activate that layer and let you do the processing.

Here is where we need to put in a little caution about resolution. There is a lot of confusion about just what is meant by the various terms to describe resolution in the digital scrapbooking world. If you are interested in what the terms mean and what you should look for when talking about resolution, here is an article that goes into more depth : DPI vs. PPI. Whatever terms your software uses, whatever resolution you decide to work in, remember that the papers, elements, and photos all need to be the same resolution or you will be doing a lot of resizing. A common question in digital scrapping circles is : " I have a background and a photo in a document, but when I add my digital ribbon element it is tiny (or huge). What happened?". What happened is that most likely a 72ppi digital element (the ribbon) has been moved into a 300ppi document. You will have to resize or change the ppi of the digital element to match the background document (or vice versa). A "standard" of 300 ppi has been used by most digital scrapbook designers - and it is what is used in DeeDoo's designs. Being consistent allows you to mix and match elements and kits.

So, you've created your masterpiece... Now what? You have to save it. Different programs have different terminology, but for most of them, in the top menu bar select file/save as. Why "save as" instead of "save"? Because it is a good habit to get into. Even if you are going to save it to the same file name, it's a good habit that will prevent much moaning and wailing in the future by making you stop and think during the save process. It will help keep you from making the serious mistake of overwriting original images! What do you "save as"? That depends on what you are going to do with your work. If you think you may go back and work on it or make changes in the future, you will need to save a copy of your work with layers intact. Again, different programs have their own defaults for this - in Photoshop, save as .psd, in Paint Shop Pro, you could save as .pspimage. In some programs, you can save a .tif file complete with layers. If you are not going to be changing the file later and won't need layers, you can save a lot of space on your hard drive and merge your layers into one and save as a .jpg. With hard drives so inexpensive these days, we'd recommend saving as a tif or png instead - the quality will be better and you avoid this problem with a jpg file - the jpg file loses data through compression every time you resave it. Open a jpg, work on it and resave it - even at 100% quality - and more data is lost. Most of the time that won't be noticeable to the average eye. However, the more detailed the image, the quicker the loss becomes evident. So to avoid unnecessary degradation, don't save your work off as a jpg until you are ready to go to print, post in a gallery, or send via email to friends and family.

Since you are keeping your workflow smooth and remaining consistent, your finished layout is probably a 12x12 300 ppi document. You can easily resize that to 8x8 for printing on a regular printer - or you can purchase a wide format printer (see our Article on Printers for more information ), or take your work to a print service such as Kinko's or Costco's and have it printed. They will usually print on a larger paper such as 12 x 18, so you can get your 12x12 and a couple of smaller images printed on the same sheet. If you want to submit your work to an online gallery or email to friends, the large pixel sized 300ppi image won't be necessary. With jpeg files, you can change the amount of compression to make the file size smaller for easier web viewing or emailing. Typically, galleries like 800x800 or 500x500 pixel images to be uploaded. If you compress that size as a medium resolution jpg, you will get a good compromise of image quality and web page size.

We thought we'd close with some general hints and observations:

You will notice that we refer to several different file types. A quick overview of them might be in order.

JPG or JPEG (you'll find it referred to both ways) is a lossy compression format. That means that your file size will be smaller (much smaller in most cases), but data will be lost in the shrinking of the size. In a sense, the jpg algorithm throws away data that it thinks unnecessary or redundant - and in most cases it does an excellent job of that. Just remember the warning - every time a jpg is opened and worked on, then resaved, it runs the compression algorithm again "throwing away" more data. The major advantages of jpg are file size and that is a universally recognized format by almost all software and computer platforms.

TIF or TIFF is a lossless format and is generally uncompressed. You have lossless compression options when saving as a tif. These can make the file size smaller, but keep in mind that not all programs can open compressed tif files. Tif files can be used to save layers in some programs. It's a very good format for saving and preserving data, though it's drawbacks are that file size is usually large and tiffs saved in PC format may not be readable by Macs and vice versa.

GIF is a file format that was developed for the web. It is designed to keep file sizes to a minimum. GIF files are also generally recognized by most software and computer platforms. GIF images can also be combined into a single file to create a GIF animation. GIF files can have transparency. A possible downside would be the 256 color restriction.

PNG is a file format that became popular when there were license issues with the GIF format. It uses a lossless compression format. PNG has some advantages over the GIF format in that PNG files generally compress better than GIFs , PNG has alpha channel support (which means variable transparency is possible), and PNG supports truecolor which means millions of colors vs. the GIF file's 256 colors. Though becoming more popular and accepted, not all web browsers and software fully support the PNG format.

To muddy the water a little bit, the above file formats are known as bitmap or raster formats. There is another type of file format and that is the scaleable vector graphic (.svg). Vector graphics have the distinct advantage of being resizeable without any loss of quality. We just mention them in passing here since most beginner and many intermediate software programs don't use vector graphics. Those that do use vector graphics, however, allow a lot more flexibility in sizing and stretching over bitmap graphics. Some programs like Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop use both.

When you resize an image in your layout, each time you resize it degrades it more. There are ways around this. One way would be to make a copy of the layer you are resizing and play with it til you get the size you want. Make a note of the size. Delete that layer and then resize the original layer to your established size. Photoshop CS 2 has a handy feature called Smart Objects that lets you perform a number of processes such as transform (resize) multiple times on an image without compromising the quality.

Something that many overlook that will help you keep your layouts organized is to label your layers. Particularly as your layout gets larger, you will lose track of what element is in what layer. Keeping them named also allows you to experiment. If you can easily find a particular element, you can quickly turn its visibility off or on (not all programs let you do this) to see how it looks in the layout. If you have lots of layers, trying that could get frustrating. Some digi scrappers will also use layers to keep organized. They will create a layer and type information such as the designer of the kit or element they are using. They will hide the visibility of that layer. Then they save the copy of the layout with layers intact. When they call it back up later, the layer with the information is still available.

Hopefully this article has been enough to get you started on your digital journey. You've learned what digital scrapbooking is and some of the terms you might run into in the digital scrapbooking world. You've learned about layers and how to use them. You've learned how to save and print your masterpiece. So, now that you know how, go do. Should you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us!

© 2006 Dee Doo's Digital Scrapbooking. All Rights Reserved. Dee Doo's Digital Scrapbooking , your source for unique digital scrapbooking items. This article may be included on your website or in email, provided it is published in its entirety, including this credit and link.