Distinctive digital scrapbooking downloads can seriously enhance your layout design, save you time, and reduce your hobby costs. If you’ve not already figured out how, read on!
Consider this scenario:
- You just started digital scrapbooking and acchihealth.com downloaded a few papers, kits and templates
- Your friend recently mentioned there are lots of sites with freebies
- You’ve Googled “digital scrapbook free” and found a bunch of sites such as freedigitalscrapbooking.com, shabbyprincess.com, scrapbookflair.com, cottagearts.net, scrapgirls.com, etc.
But which one(s) to choose? How can you tell if they are any good? You’ve already spent quite a bit of time and money on digital products, but found the print quality wasn’t what you’d hoped for, and not all templates could easily be personalized with the embellishments you wanted to use.
Skills you need:
Firstly, you need to be able to find and download suitable digital products with good quality design and images you can use easily for your own purposes.
This means being clear about what type of digital product you are looking for. Some downloadable products are designed to be printed for use in traditional scrapbooking projects. The main benefits are the convenience of download delivery and low cost – but remember the price of paper and ink!
Other products are designed for use in computer scrapbooking projects where the page layout is designed and created using software, and the resulting pages or album can be shared in print and online.
Digital papers, sketches, digital templates, layouts and digital scrapbooking kits are all different types of product, and serve different purposes. For example, you can get page layout ideas from sketches, which you can re-create in your scrapbooking software, and use in either digital or paper projects.
But with a downloadable digital scrapbooking template, you can open the file in your scrapbooking package or photo-editing software, add your photos, embellishments and journaling to complete your personalized layout, and so get off to a fast start with your project.
Why JPG and PNG?
Have you ever wondered why some items come in JPG and PNG versions? You’re not alone!
But there is a straight forward answer…
JPG files are often used for backgrounds and for printable digital products such as alphabets, embellishments, or transparencies to be used in paper scrapbooks. The resulting print quality should be good.
Digital scrapbookers use PNG files because these can be “stacked” up to create multi-layer scrapbooking layouts, just as you would with physical products. Its the transparent background that PNG files have which enables this stacking without any background being visible.
However, PNG files seem to present a challenge to some types of printer. So if you want to print your PNG layout files, you may get better results printing PNG files from your photo-editing software, or even just importing to MS Word and printing from there.
Secondly, you need to be able to use your photo-editing software effectively to create your page layouts.
For usage details of your software, you’ll need to spend some time working through tutorials, but here’s what to do when you start by downloading a digital scrapbooking template:
Downloads often come compressed as zip files. These have been saved up in a special way that reduces the files’ size, so making them a little quicker to download. To use them, you must “unzip” them to restore the files to their original state.