Digi Help

I've had a few requests for help with digital scrapbooking since posting my last post.

So here's the deal: everything I learned is just a click away for you. Literally. Everything I know I've by clicking here and clicking there and opening windows and trying what others say worked. But here's the Cliff note (or Cole's note for you Canadians) version of what I know.

1. There are oodles of free digital paper and elements all over the internet. My favorite is http://www.shabbyprincess.com/ - she has sets that you can buy but also puts out a free set every couple of months. Everything I did this weekend was with her latest freebie called "Happy-go-lucky".

2. Photoshop elements is easy to work with and relatively cheap. They offer a free 30 day trial to make sure you like it (not sure if the trial is available for Mac users).

3. If you use Photoshop the most important thing to remember is LAYERS. It's all about the layers. Think of it like one of those grade school science books that has the transparency pages with the different parts of the human body on it. Everything you do is one of those layers and whatever you want to see 100% of needs to be on the top layer.

4. For tutorials on Photoshop elements I really like Jessica Sprague http://spraguelab.squarespace.com/. She offfers Photoshop Friday tutorials every Friday teaching a new technique. These is also a library of past Friday tutorials. I find it helpful to have Photoshop open in one window and her tutorial open in another window. I then watch her tutorial and pause it frequently to try what she does.

5. I store all the digital paper and elements on my external hard drive sorted by set - that saves a little space on my hard drive.

6. I like to create my pages as 8x8. I have in the past created it as an 8x8, printed it as an 8x10, cut off the two inches of white space when I get it back from printing. Costco does 8x10 printing for dirt cheap. This is a little confusing because you need to change the canvas size to 8x10 after creating it in order to print it properly. This might be a time to ask for help if you need it. I then put them in an 8x8 album or mount then on a 12x12 cardstock and put them in my 12x12 album My latest idea though is to create 8x8 pages for each month for each kid and then drop them into a Shutterfly album. I think that's where I'm heading this year - like I said, I like to try new things.

That's it.

Happy clicking.

Call me if you want more of tutorial. All you need to do is provide a Starbucks latte and I'm all yours! It's not hard to please me.