Digital Scrapbooking

I've decided to try my hand at digital scrapbooking.

I didn't even know such a thing existed until a couple of weeks ago, when I was scanning genealogy blogs and discovered Creative Genealogy, a blog which promotes combining scrapbooking techniques with genealogy. I was intrigued, but not really interested in doing it myself.

However, I'm not happy with this blog design or the design of my genealogy website and have been pondering what to do. Last night, I did a little browsing on the digital scrapbooking concept and learned that there all kinds of "kits" one can purchase or download for free. The kits contain "papers" (backgrounds), flowers, ribbons, stamps. . .all the things one would use in traditional scrapbooking, but in digital image form. Download the files into Photoshop and you are ready to go.

My Photoshop skills were never better than meager and now are practically non-existent. I've wanted to start using it again, but was too overwhelmed with the thoughts of trying to learn the program again. But I found an easy-to-follow tutorial on "Creating your first layout using Photoshop" at Shabby Princess, one of the digital scrapbooking sites I visited last night.

I played around with a free kit and re-learned the basics of getting around in Photoshop. I ended up with a simple image - just a cropped photo with a label. I ended up not using any of the elements from the digital kit; I liked the image so much that I didn't want to add anything to it.



I can envision so many ways to use digital scrapbooking to spice up my genealogy work. After learning and playing a bit more, I intend to redesign the blog and website layouts, using scrapbooking techniques to create a new masthead and headers. I think it would also be fun to alter my photographs before uploading them to the website. And last, but not least, I see individual pages that combine photos and histories in collage form.

Lots of fun to come!