Digital Scrapbooking in Photoshop

A Guide to Getting Started

Digital scrapbooking is a great, cheap, and fun way to scrapbook all of your pictures, especially those digital ones that you just don’t know what to do with. You can create so many different and interesting digital scrapbook pages that I know once you start, you’ll be addicted. Here’s a guide to getting started with digital scrapbooking and a step by step process of creating an easy layout in Adobe Photoshop CS to give you practice.

Now, before you start going digital scrapbook crazy there are a couple of things you’ll need. First, you’ll need a picture or design program. I personally prefer Adobe Photoshop, but any picture/design program will work. You also may want to go to some of the various digital scrapbooking sites where you can find free digital elements and paper that others have created. There are a lot of free resources if you just take a look around.

Now on to the fun part! Let’s create your first digital scrapbook page!

A Little about Photoshop: 
When you open Photoshop you will see several things. First, on the left you will see your tools. This is where you’ll find all of the instruments you’ll need to do your design. On the right you should have two menus, one is the history, which keeps track of everything you do on your page and works really well for correcting lots of mistakes. If you click back on the history, you’ll go back to that point in your project. The second menu is the layer menu. Layers are the different elements of your project. Each new layer you add is a different element on your page. This allows you to work with one section without disturbing others. On the top are also several menus that you can use to edit your project. Now let’s get started.

Step 1: Getting started.
Select File on the top bar and then select New. You’ll get a box with different options. This is where you set the size of your document and the amount of pixels you want to use. The more pixels, the clearer, but bigger, your file. For this project we’ll use 300 pixels/inch and use the size 6x6 (the size can always be changed later) and press ok.