A Beginner's Guide to Digital Scrapbooking

With technology, you know, taking over the world, we thought it was high time we tapped the brain of our resident digi-goddess, Miss Julie Walton. 

Julie is here today to share a tutorial on how to create a digital layout quick and easy style...

Let's get started!

Traditional scrapbooking is all about touching, feeling, getting messy with paint, ink and glue and sometimes that's all that will do.  Digital scrapbooking is all about manipulating, creating layers and easy do-over's ....over and over again. 

I do both and have for years, and I believe there's a time and place for each.  So if you're a paper scrapper with a curiosity for digi, read on. I'm going to give you a quick lesson to help you get started digital scrapboking.

I use Adobe Photoshop CS4 but learned on Photoshop Elements and the two are fairly similar. This is the layout we will be creating:

The first rule of digital scrapbooking is, it's all about the layers!

Step One: Open your program and start with a new file.

Step Two: Open the digital papers, elements and photo you would like to use. I used the All About Me collection by Webster's Pages.

Step Three: Once you have all of your files open, start dragging the papers and elements onto your blank file. Begin with the papers first as they will become your background.

With the paper file open next to the blank file, use your move tool (usually the first tool in your toolbar on the left side of the screen, circled above) to drag the paper onto the blank page. 

Then close the paper file. You'll see in your layers palette that you now have the background layer and the paper layers:

Step Four: Once you have all of your files on your background it's time to start playing with sizing, placement and layer order.

In order to resize the items, make sure the layer with the item you want to resize is active. Look at the Layer Palette in the right corner and click on the layer that has the item you want to resize, it will be highlighted. Now you will see little boxes on the corners of the item. Grab one of the boxes with your move tool and move in or out, making it smaller or bigger.

(In this screen shot above, I have the layer with the balloon active.)

To change the layer order of an item, simply go to the layer palette, grab the layer you want to move and move it up or down in the layer stack.

Here you can see that I have resized and moved the elements into a basic design and am now ready to add a photo!

Step Five: Just like you did with the papers, open your photo and drag it onto your layout. Resize as you wish and move it within the layer stack until you get it where you want it. I generally like to tuck it in somewhere with layers over it and under it.

Are you hooked? It doesn't seem so hard when Julie breaks it all down for us, does it? Well, don't worry, you can head right over to inspireME and fnd out the rest of the details on how to create this layout! 

Click HERE to read this whole post (and get your digital layout finished!)...and while you're in a clicky mood, feel free to peruse the digital products over on our website...you're going to love them! 

Happy {digital} Scrapping!

Comments

[Megan Smith]

Super cute layout Julie (as always)! Thanks for the tutorial!

[tanya d]

Love it. Thanks for wonderful tutorial.

[Jean Marmo]

So cute!

[Emeline]

thanks for a step by step, Julie! Lovely layout :)

[Doris Widder]

Wonderful tutorial! Thank you! :-D

[camisetas armani]

It’s good webpage, I was looking for something like this