Introduction to Digital Scrapbooking (Self-Paced Tutorial)

Lesson 1

What Is Digital Scrapbooking?

Digital editing gives scrapbooking a new level of creativity! In the first lesson, you'll have an opportunity to become familiar with the online classroom, Photoshop Elements 11 (the digital editing software you'll be using in this course), and a number of ways to integrate digital options with traditional scrapbooking. You'll see how to keep your personal style intact while taking advantage of fun and easy techniques to enhance your scrapbooks.

Journaling

In this lesson, you'll have an opportunity to experiment with and explore the many options for enhancing text. You'll see how to add color, shape, and styles, along with more advanced techniques like warping text to fit on objects, making circles with words, and transforming images into text. Journaling is an important part of the storytelling process, so it's time to put the words to work!

Layering

Whether you're working with scissors and glue or digital images, one of the ways to embellish scrapbook pages is to layer artistic elements. In this, you'll explore Adobe's layers so you can master the ability to build pages with many different pieces to create the look that tells your story best! The lesson will discuss sizing, background images, frames, and piecing together pages with multiple images, text, and clip art.

Clip Art

Now that you're comfortable with backgrounds, cropping, text, and layers, it's time to add some pizzazz to your pages! In this lesson, you'll see how to create and use clip art to add personal touches and dimension to your scrapbook. You may be surprised at how many important details you have in your pictures, and with Photoshop Elements, you'll be able to pick those out and use them just where you want them. Creating clip art is fun and easy with the tools in Elements. You'll be a pro by the time you finish this lesson!

Themed Layouts

Continuity and strong story lines captivate readers—even in scrapbooks! This lesson focuses on defining themes, using repetitive elements, and sizing enlargements for excellent quality. You'll see how to build two-page layouts, create panoramic images, and use two different techniques for adding frames to your pages.

Beauty of Black and White

Bold and beautiful, black-and-white photography leads to a lesson on how to take a classic look and make it modern, timeless, or even old-fashioned. You'll see how to turn color photos into stunning black-and-white images, or how to keep just a portion in color. You'll also explore using gradients to create black-and-white backgrounds to set off color images.

Creative Illusions

In this lesson, you'll work a little magic as you learn to create special effects to enhance your backgrounds and pages. You'll even be able to create some of these from nothing! The illusion of texture and dimension is important when building a sophisticated scrapbook, and you'll look at ways to build pages that might just make you wonder if they're real. With the Effects panel, the Filter menu, and some new tricks with layers and layer styles, you'll be amazed at what you can do.

Bountiful Brushes

Much like finger painting lets you release your artistic side, Photoshop Elements brushes are full of possibilities for detailed strokes, colors, and patterns—some even paint pictures! You'll see how to use the standard brushes, create and customize your own, and build pages and backgrounds with a variety of styles and patterns.

Digital Nostalgia

In this lesson, you'll see how to turn back the hands of time to create pages using restored images and nostalgic pages. You'll also learn how to age a modern photo to match the look of older ones. With the pattern tools in Photoshop Elements, you'll create fabric-like backgrounds and even see how to add a bit of stitching. Digital editing merges the old and the new in surprising ways!

3D Imagery

Digital scrapbooking gives you lots of options for creating three-dimensional looks, and in this lesson, you'll see how to use new shortcuts to make this quick and easy. With Photoshop Elements Guided Edit and special filters, you'll be able to create reflections, spheres, and many more effects.

Digital Drawing

It's time to draw! You'll be surprised by how creative you can be with Photoshop Elements drawing tools, even if you don't think of yourself as artistic. With the Pencil tool, the Undo option, and the Eraser tool, changes and corrections are easy. You can even remove something and put it back. You'll see how to add line graphics with Wingdings and turn color images into coloring pages, as well as some other drawing techniques you can use to build backgrounds and art for your scrapbook pages.

Bringing It All Together

In the last lesson, you'll explore a couple of automatic options in Photoshop Elements to help you finish your scrapbooks quickly. You'll see how to build an automatic collage page from your images and how to upload them to book formats you can print at home or send out to have professionally printed. You'll finish this course with lots of great ideas to finish your scrapbooks and share them with your family and friends!