Digital Scrapbooking: Part 3 - What I do

I know, I know, this is the part that you really wanted from the start. But the bonus for me is that this is my blog, I am a 'Chatty Cathy' when it comes to scrapbooking, and I wanted to do it in the right order. So, I am finally getting to the nitty gritty.

If you want the background on how we got here, you can check out Part 1 - The Paper Years and Part 2 - From Paper to Digital.

Just as there are so many ways to share pictures or scrapbook with paper, there are many ways to digitally scrapbook. I will talk about the other options in another post. I make hardbound books similar to yearbooks. I make each page and then use a printing house to print and bind. I have one for 2006, 2007, our trip to Hawaii and am working on the pages for 2008.

The first thing I do is look at each of my pictures individually. To view my pictures, I use Adobe Bridge that came with Photoshop but you can just as easily use My Computer. I delete all the really bad pictures - blurry, horrific expressions, closed eyes, etc. Delete, not move to another folder, delete. You don't need them and will never do anything with them. Really, delete! This can be done when you upload the pictures to your computer or when you are ready to scrapbook.

To do the actual scrapbooking, I use Lumapix's product FotoFusion Enhanced. Lumapix has three versions of Fotofusion and I use the middle product. There is very good information and tutorials on their website on how to choose what is right for you. I LOVE Fotofusion!

With Fotofusion I can lay out the pictures; turn pictures black and white; modify the colors of the frames around the pictures, make the shapes different or even remove the frames; put color or digital paper in the background; and add text to journal the who, what, where. It has tools to help me to lay out the pictures quickly. It has the ability to make the frames (the outside of the picture) bigger or smaller while independently zooming in or out on my picture (this is HUGE). I can make one of my pictures the background of the page - it can be full color or muted. I add other items besides pictures, like ticket stubs, maps, art work by just taking a picture or scanning them in.

Since I make a yearbook type book, I design one page at a time in Fotofusion and save them individually. I output the page as a single picture that is the size I need for my book.

After choosing my printing house (Shutterfly, Creative Memories, My Publisher, etc), I download their free software. I use the one picture per page option and drop each of my pages into it with no additional editing or work. I usually will do this as I go along making pages to see how it looks, if my next page will be a right-hand or left-hand page, etc.

For a step-by-step walk-through of making a page, check out Part 4 of this series.

In future posts, let's talk other programs for scrapbooking, how to print, organization. What else? What questions am I not answering yet?