From digital to print and back

The great thing about creating a digital scrapbooking page is that there’s almost no limit to the ideas you can try. And with a little thought, you can easily go from digital to printed pages and back again. Here are some tips on preparing your scrapbooking page for printing, as well as ideas for scanning your traditional pages and using elements from the pages in your other projects.

From digital to print

A graphics program like Photoshop CS4 ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) makes creating a digital scrapbook page fairly simple. Your page can include a colorful background, engaging photos, text entries, and embellishments—those extras like ribbons and tags and buttons that add personality to your pages—each on separate layers you can manipulate independently. (For this example, I’m using Photoshop CS4, but you can easily accomplish these tasks in earlier versions of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ), or another graphics program that supports layers.)

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The great thing about creating a digital scrapbooking page is that there’s almost no limit to the ideas you can try. And with a little thought, you can easily go from digital to printed pages and back again. Here are some tips on preparing your scrapbooking page for printing, as well as ideas for scanning your traditional pages and using elements from the pages in your other projects.

From digital to print

A graphics program like Photoshop CS4 ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) makes creating a digital scrapbook page fairly simple. Your page can include a colorful background, engaging photos, text entries, and embellishments—those extras like ribbons and tags and buttons that add personality to your pages—each on separate layers you can manipulate independently. (For this example, I’m using Photoshop CS4, but you can easily accomplish these tasks in earlier versions of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ), or another graphics program that supports layers.)

The following tips offer some guidelines for creating a page you plan to print:

Planning your page

Starting with the end in mind is always a good idea—but it’s even more important when you’re preparing your pages for print. From the beginning, think about the colors you plan to use—on the page background, in your headings and captions, and in the photos themselves. Will you have enough contrast? Is your page background filled with a dark pattern? In print, the pattern may overwhelm the images on the page. Consider the limits of your particular printer. Is borderless printing an option for you? Make sure your printer can print all the way to the edge of the page, if that’s part of your design.

Fussing over fonts

The fonts you choose for the page need to be sturdy enough to show up on a printed background. Some fonts, when printed, may appear thinner than they look onscreen. If you place delicate fonts on a busy background, the characters may be difficult to read and detract from the overall effect of your page. You can do a test print to see how the fonts will look on the page and, if you want to make them a bit sturdier, add bold to the selected font, choose a different font, or lighten the background by applying a different color or pattern to the page. Choosing the right color for your fonts can also help build the contrast and help the characters stand out.

Print time

You can change the print dimensions and the image resolution when it's time to print, and your changes will affect the printed file but not the saved image. Insert high-quality photo paper in your printer and print the page at the highest resolution your printer supports. If your printout doesn't print in the correct size, download and install the Adobe Photoshop CS4 Optional plug-ins, restart Photoshop, and print your page once again.

…And back again

Scanning a printed scrapbook page and assembling it in your image editing software may be a bit tricky, depending on the size of the page and the number of elements you’ve added to it. A page with lots of embellishments—metal tags, alphabet blocks, ribbons, photo corners, and more—may feel like a lot to scan, but the more accurate your scan, the better the file you’ll have to work with in your editing program. We're using Photoshop CS4 for this example.

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