Craft Spectacular Scrapbook Pages On Your Computer
by Sharon Oosthoek - excerpted from Microsoft Home Magazine
Record family memories in creative ways
As scrapbookers everywhere are fond of saying, an album only displays photos, but a scrapbook tells a story. With a little help from your computer, scrapbooks can let you gather memories, souvenirs and snapshots of your children and share them with family and friends.
Selecting Software
There is a wide selection of software designed to help you get the best out of your photos, drawings, text and embellishments. Kim Hazelwood, owner of Scrapbook Emporium Inc. in Oshawa, Ont., says she sometimes likes to work with Journaling Genie software, which will pull your text into interesting shapes. "If you want it to look like a swirl, like a candy rolled up, it'll pull it into that shape for you," she says. Many scrapbookers think font and text layout are the most important parts of the page-making process. "The fonts reflect what is happening in the photos and the page layout," says Silvia Massey, a scrapbooker from Whitby, Ont.
You do not have to buy specific scrapbook software to spice up your pages. A simple word-processing program, such as Microsoft Word, allows you to place your text in different shapes and sizes for photo captions or headlines.
There's also software that lets you enhance your photos by balancing colour, removing red-eye, cropping and adding borders. Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 also provides scrapbook page templates for a variety of occasions to inspire creativity.
Designing a layout
Massey says photos and drawings look best when edges are straight and when they're placed on mats that bring out the colours in the image. "When you look at my early albums, I hardly matted anything. Now I triple-mat the focal point of the page and I can't tell you how much better it looks," she says. Massey also experiments with oval and circle mats to create variety on her pages. You can create mats with your computer using colourful border images or placing a photo inside a shape pattern.
Adding your text
Journalling is just another term for placing text on the scrapbook pages. Add a date and description to your family vacation photos, tell a funny story about your daughter's first day at school or simply write down your feelings at a certain party or event.
Once you've decided what to write, Hazelwood suggests printing your text on a separate sheet of paper that you can glue to your scrapbook page. That way, you can move the text around to see where it fits best on the page.
Massey uses the computer for all of her photo captions and text boxes. "It's so much neater than writing it out yourself. I like to use formal fonts that look like handwriting."
Going acid-free
When printing your images and text you should use acid-free paper. We've all seen old, yellowed, brittle photos and you should take precautions so your memory book can avoid this fate. You can buy acid-free paper at scrapbooking stores, some photo retail stores and online scrapbook retailers.
Making memories that last
"When my own children take down their Volumes of Life Albums and follow their own lives from babies to present on the pages of the scrapbook, I will know all my time and effort was worth it. And they will have the books to show their families in years to come," says Hazelwood.