Sunday, November 01, 2009

Digital Scrapbooking Anyone?

Some of you may already know this about me, but I am a closet cardmaker. I'm terrible at it, and don't do it very often, but if you put me in a store with a bunch of scrapbooking materials I will go crazy and buy some things and make a not-so-great-looking card eventually. Real scrapbooking is a whole different beast however. And when it comes to making a photo album I'm totally lost.

This photo album blockage has been on my mind for a while now, especially with a baby coming. I thought going digital might help, and iPhoto and photo websites like Shutterfly have very simple templates one can use for this but for a baby book I wanted something more - lots of page templates (or even blank templates to build your own pages) and some extra features like different backgrounds or digital 'stamps' and decorations. So I asked someone in photography and was recommended two options: Adobe Photoshop (which has a digital scrapbooking add-on that you can buy) and Creative Memories (a traditional scrapbooking company that has made digital software).

Creative Memories:
In the end I went with Creative Memories. They have a free version you can download and play with (and actually use, although it's very limited) and the software itself is $65. Then you can buy various packages (like a baby-girl package of templates and decorations for $15). It works a lot like Microsoft Power Point so it's very easy to use and in the end you can use their sweet high-quality printing service to make hard-back or paper-back books.

They have a TON of other stuff and I will probably be entertained by this for a lifetime. Plus it's kind of run like Avon so there's a sales rep in my district that is going to constantly bug me to come to her parties and try new products. Hopefully it will be fun and not annoying. I am going to take advantage of her immediately and invite her over to host a digital scrapbooking party so I can have some girls over and learn the full power of the software. Hopefully I can get someone else hooked so I can be extra-motivated.

Let me know if you use or know someone that uses this software!

3 comments:

uncle bruce said...

Our 1st child was pre-digital, so I have huge photo albums at home, every possible picture of her, I was unable to throw anything away even if I had 8 others from the same dance recital and they were all too small and out of focus.

So along came #2 and I just ran out of gas. No more albums. Fortunately digital cameras came along and every single photo is on some computer somewhere; not organized or anything.

#1 REALLY liked looking through her old photos. #2 doesn't seem to have such a great need. But I would say all these photo collections are mainly for the kids themselves.

Uncle KT said...

That sounds like a great idea!!

mini pendant lighting said...

That is so cool I am definetly going to look into this.

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