How to do Photoshop Scrapbooking

By learning how to do Photoshop scrapbooking, you can generate the types of scrapbooks your friends can only dream of. As technology pushes forward, it's no surprise that the craft of scrapbooking is moving off the page and onto the computer. Photoshop scrapbooking is becoming a popular trend for hobbyists jumping on the digital bandwagon. Let's take a look at how you can take advantage of this fun new pastime.

Choose your software. Photoshop is a popular digital picture editing program released by Adobe. There are a few different versions of the software that allow the user to do different things, but the one you should get is called Photoshop Elements 7. The more expensive brands are for professional photographers and video editors. You don't need to do anything too fancy when digital scrapbooking with Photoshop, so the Elements version should fit your needs.

Start your scrapbooking project. Once you have the program installed and ready to go, you'll want to open it and create a new file. Here you can select the size of the page, as well as the resolution. You'll want the resolution to be at least 300 pixels per inch to avoid any pixelation of images that will cause them to look fuzzy. Once you finish selecting your size preferences, the program will open with a blank page.

Add backgrounds and layers. The great thing about Photoshop is that it works in layers. You can add a background to your page by opening a picture file saved to your desktop. Once you have selected your background, open the picture you want to add to the page. Anytime you open a new picture file in Photoshop, a thumbnail version will appear at the bottom of the screen, as well as appear in full in the editing box. You can add the picture on top of the background by clicking-and-dragging it from the editing box and plopping it down onto the thumbnail of the background. On the right side of the screen you should now see your layers; one for the background and the other for the picture.

You can then add more pictures to your page using the above technique. You can edit them as you see fit, too. Twist them, tilt them or change their size. Since each new picture you add will be a new layer, you can overlap them. Have fun and experiment. When you're all done, you can save the Photoshop scrapbook page to your computer for use in a digital scrapbook slide show, or, if you like the more traditional route, you can print it out and put it in your actual scrapbook.