Digital Scrapbooking

With the digital cameral has come a whole new craze in scrapbooking. Digital scrapbooking has With the digital cameral has come a whole new craze in scrapbooking. Digital scrapbooking has opened doors to anything from designing your own scrapbook "paper" to sharing your designed pages with others by simply sending them to a scrapbook website via email attachments.

Digital scrapbooking is a hard concept to grasp for some of the old school scrapbookers. We have acid free and lignin free scrapbooking paper, die cuts, etc. ingrained in our heads and it is hard to imaging creating a page without going to the store for the latest stickers, papers and whatever else the scrapbooking world has recently brought to us.

The beauty of digital scrapbooking is that you can custom create each page on your computer but you can still print it and embellish it with all your scrapbooking supplies if you wish. Every page is unique because you create it, you design it and you personalize it. Even if you use a template you still have the ability to add to it either on your computer or through embellishments once it is printed.

Where do you start to learn about digital scrapbooking? You can find free tutorials online, you can buy digital scrapbooking software or you can rely on your own creativity and use something like photo shop to play with your pictures, crop them, make them black and white, etc. There is no limit as to what you can do with this new scrapbooking craze. Even those of you who don't know your way around the computer very well will be able to learn and will be addicted from the minute you finish your first page.

In order to do digital scrapbooking you must own a digital camera. You download your pictures on the computer and then you sort them exactly how you would with developed photos. Put them in folders by theme, by person, by event, in chronological order or however you like to sort your pictures.

Once you have your pictures sorted it is time to start the creative process. If you own digital scrapbooking software you will find thousands of templates or designs to choose from including borders, frames, headlines and themed background paper. Simply drop your pictures into the page and have fun rearranging items until you have the page done the way you like it. If you don't like something you can simply delete and try something new and if you don't like what you wrote just rewrite it. Any of you who have ever glued something in the wrong place or misspelled a word can appreciate this.

There are hundreds of digital scrapbooking software products, tips and websites online. You can find some software for free and others that typically cost less than $40. Search for websites that include chat rooms to get tips from fellow scrapbookers and sites that allow you to share your pages with others and to view the pages that others have done. Digital scrapbooking opens the doors to an endless possibility of ways to preserve your memories.