Digital Scrapbooking

If you are thinking of making the move to digital scrapbooking you will do well to read this book by Sally Beacham and Lori J. Davis. Assuming that you have not committed to one image editor, the authors use five popular image editors in the examples throughout the book. They demonstrate the similarities and differences between Jasc Paint Shop Pro, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Microsoft Digital Image Pro, Serif Photo Plus and Ulead Photo Impact. But this book is not about imaging software. It is about digital scrapbooking.The authors begin by discussing the pros and cons of digital scrapbooking and what you will need to get started. Besides showing how to make completely digital scrapbook pages, the authors also show many ways to integrate digital scrapbooking with traditional scrapbooking.Next, they cover scanning photos into the computer and what can be done to correct and enhance your photos once they are in digital form. They discuss image corrections such as cropping, alignment, noise reduction, red eye removal and color correction.The authors discuss two popular styles for scrapbook pages. The first style, faux-paper, emulates the textured paper, fibers, tags and other embellishments of traditional scrapbook pages. The second type, graphic design, has a more commercial look which emphasizes enhancement of photos and elaborate word art. They discuss how to use pre-designed layouts and how to design your own pages digitally.Next, they begin to build a digital layout. They discuss color and how it should relate to and enhance your photos. Once you have chosen a color and texture for the background of your layout, you add your photos.Text techniques and word art are a natural extension of digital scrapbooking. The authors discuss the importance of fonts and the digital effects that can be applied to the titles and journaling on your scrapbook pages.There is a large section on plug-in filters and how they greatly expand the creativity of your image editing software. The special effects from these filters can be applied to your photos, digital background papers and embellishments.The authors discuss how to save your digital page in the various formats for printing, burning to CD, emailing or posting on the web.The accompanying CD contains several tutorials, clipart, over 100 fonts, trial versions of popular plug-in filters, sample layouts and page kits.Lori J. Davis is a technical writer and author of many books on Paint Shop Pro. Sally Bracham is an author and teacher of Paint Shop Pro and related subjects.

What an Amazing book! It's for everyone that keeps asking "when will we have a book for digital scrapbooking?" This is THE digital scrapping book to have. There is something for everyone from the beginner to the advanced digital scrapbooker. There are almost 300 pages packed full of information and color photos. An added bonus is a CD that includes Tutorials, Page Kits, Templates, and Alphabets. That's not all either, there are over 100 Fonts, Clip Art, free and shareware Plugins, and Sample Layouts that were featured in the book. It is not program specific and covers Digital Image Pro, Paint Shop Pro, Photo Impact, Photoshop Elements, and Photo Plus. I work at a large digital scrapping website, Digital Scrapbook Place, and will definitely be recommending this book to our members.I am also using "Digital Scrapbooking" as a reference book and keep it on my desk. There is an index so it's easy to find whatever you're looking for quickly. I only wish this book had been available when I was struggling to learn how to digital scrap. Thank you Sally and Lori for an awesome book! It's obvious that a lot of thought went into this book to give digital scrappers exactly what they have been asking for.sandi

This is a wonderful book about digital scrapbooking! They cover of course the what and why, but most importantly they covered the how! Many books gloss over how to do the scrapping or show very low quality pages that wouldn't encourage readers to try it. But this book has it all. There's meat, there's info, it's just a wonderful resource - perfect for those who want a book they can hold and read that will really help them learn the digital concepts. And along with all this information, there is a CD full of goodies! The CD alone is worth more than the price of the book! Whether you want to learn about digital scrapbooking, get better at it, just want a CD packed with fonts, page kits, embellishments, filters, etc, or all of the above, buy this book!

Published in 2004, this book is a bit dated. A few of the software publishers mentioned have been merged, acquired or gone out of business and all the products still published have had multiple new editions released. None of this, however, reduces the utility of this fine introduction to digital scrapbooking. The authors begin with the absolute basics and move onward from there, which for the beginner to scrapbooking, much less digital scrapbooking, is an excellent route to take. They begin with a (pretty dated) review of digital photography and move on to the essentials of image editing. Layouts are next followed by using photographs creatively, which is where the book starts getting really interesting. From here they move onto adding and manipulating text elements, how to use filters, plug-ins and effects and more on image processing. More advanced topics include making your own elements to use in your creations, such as backgrounds, buttons, ribbons and fibers. Overall, this is an excellent and very well done introduction to digital scrapbooking. It may be a bit on the older side (four years!) but is still an excellent way to get into the craft.Jerry

I bought this book for a start in digital scrapbooking. It is great for teaching some of the basics, but I have Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 and the latest it includes is 2.0. Quite a few of the operations have changed when trying to do such things at adding shadows and combining layers. Needless to say I had to buy another book for 4.0. This has some great ideas however and some good information on filters.