Digital Scrapbook Week Day 2 – How I got Started and Where you can start

Story Time:  One day I was feeling pretty frustrated about scrapbooking.  I was SO far behind I thought I could never catch up.  It was 2008 and I had only scrapped up to 2005 of our marriage.  I decided it was either give up, never take anymore pictures and call the whole idea of having family memories thing over or figure something out.  I didn’t want CD’s and CD’s or prints in boxes for the rest of my life.  My mom has boxes and boxes of photos she needs to go through and I knew I didn’t want to do that.  I felt like I had to figure it out!  I had scrapbook supplies I had acquired through the year {papers, embellishments, rub-ons, ribbons, etc}  but I needed to start printing the pictures and get caught up.  $.13 cents a print at Costco plus the stuff to scrapbook the actual pictures plus glue or dots was going to add up. I counted the pictures that I would scrapbook for those four years and just printing the pictures was going to cost me at least $200+ dollars, just to print the pictures.  I remember talking to my husband and trying to figure out what to do.  My sister had just started digital scrapbooking using a program her husband bought her, so I called her up and she told me that I could get some paper and stuff off her computer.  I then set off to figure out how to digital scrap on my own.  There were many tutorials online that I googled and plenty of places to purchase paper and embellishments for very cheap or almost free. 
Long story short, within a day I had downloaded more than 100 papers and embellishments for free online through designers that were giving away freebies!!  I was so excited!  I have never had a problem with any of the downloads.  They are safe downloads through file share programs. 
The next weekend I made 20 pages in 2 hours, and was hooked!  Never to go back again and very excited to start printing books!!

So here’s how to start….
You will need three things

1. A photo editing program: something like Adobe Photoshop (PS), Adobe Photoshop Elements (PSE), Memory Mixer or any kind of program that supports .png files & layers. such as this, this or this
2. At least 256 KB RAM on your computer operating system. (obviously the more the better)
3. Digital Kits (paper, embellishments, etc.)

I currently use Photoshop CS5 because I got it as a gift, but if I were to pick a program just for scrapbooking it would be Photoshop Elements.  It is not as confusing as CS3.   This is probably your most expensive part, but once you own it you never have to buy it again!!

Here are some great places where they have tutorials or software to teach you how to get started.  I wish I could just tell you how to do it, but that would take me a while to write.  There are way better sites with videos and pictures to help you understand.
Here’s one you have to pay for, I didn’t use it, but it looks pretty nice and it’s not to expensive. I know when you buy Photoshop elements there are also tutorials for scrapbooking that come with it. 
Here are some free tutorials to get you started!
Here, Here, and a ton of them Here

Alright now that you’ve got that figured out {Ok, probably not completely, but you will I promise} then you need to start downloading kits of paper and embellishments, aka Digi Supplies!! That look like this…

  

Here are so some great companies where you can get them free or very inexpensive!
Shabby Princess – I started with this company, they do a free kit a month and the kit is huge!
Dreamsfullfilled – these ones are ALL free and very cute, and have a new layout daily!
My 4 Princesses – Great stuff in store and freebies, lots of cute LDS stuff
Kelly-Jo’s Scraps – way cute stuff, always has a fun kit!
Karen Funk Designs – Love her stuff!

I also love Blog trains.  Where a whole ton of designers have a theme and each has a freebie and then they link you to the next freebie.

Okay now the hard part.  How do you store your papers and embellishments???  Well, I have always just done it in folders on my desktop.  I have it pretty well organized, but my friend sent me and email and said…

“If you don’t already have an organizer for all your digi-supplies. I HIGHLY recommend picasa. You can download it for free from google, and it is the best thing ever. It allows you to scroll through and easily view your whole stash, AND you can tag everything by type, color, etc. I don’t know how I ever even managed before I found picasa. Picasa automatically finds all your files and keeps them in the same folders they are currently in, but allows you to just scroll through to see them all. Under the “tools” menu, click options, then the “file types” tab. There you can choose the file types you want it to find. So make sure you check at least jpg, png, psd, & tiff. Those are the common file types used for digi-scrapping.
It’s important to know that picasa just links to the file on your hard drive, so if you delete something from picasa, it also gets deleted from your hard drive.
And…when you add new files, picasa will automatically find them. It’s the greatest thing.
While scrapping, I recommend having photoshop open to full size, then have picasa minimized only to have about an inch open on the left hand side (so you can see about an inch of the photoshop screen). Then you can just drag and drop the files you want from picasa to photoshop. It’s that easy!
Definately check it out. It’s a timesaver!”
-Karen

I was very excited to hear this, and very excited to get my digi-supplies more organized. 
This might feel a bit overwhelming.  Start slow by first finding a system to use.  It might take a lot of time to set up, and learn, but once you know how you will be able to do pages in minutes and without a mess to clean up!! 
I just had to show you my first scrapbook pages done with photoshop…
I have since become a better photographer 😉 and hopefully designer, but not bad for a first try eh??