I have been taking a delightful online class about how to make a digital scrapbooking book. This particular class is taught by Linda Sattgast, who is an expert on digi-scrapbooking with Photoshop Elements (which I use) and with Photoshop (which I don’t think I will ever use.) Linda’s website is Digitalscrapper.com, and while I paid for this class there are a lot of good digital scrapbooking freebies there too.

The class that I am taking began in January and ends in December, and each month we have a different assignment. This afternoon I did a larger version of the image you see here, large enough to be an 8.5 by 11 page in the photo book I will end up with.

I researched places that will print either softcover or hardcover photo books — I’ll likely do a hardcover for myself and softcover for family gifts. I’ve set up a template in Photoshop Elements at 8 and 3/4 inches wide and 11 and 1/4 inches tall, to allow for cropping on the edges. I’m being sure not to put essential bits of photos right by those edges.

We’ve done photo books at shutterfly.com, and here is a link to a site with reviews comparing ten of the most popular photo book websites.

Doing the Actual Pages

This is one of the more elaborate pages I’ve done for the book, and also the least scrapbooky. I admit that my style is more like photocollage. Digital scrapbooking tends to draw on images of ribbons, flowers, buttons, and other cute things… I have used those on some of the pages for my books, but not always. For a couple of examples, here is a photocollage I did of my very old dog, LarryDog, on my dogs website, and here is one of the town of Ajijic, near where I lived in Mexico several years ago.

I don’t really know how other people do it but I start with a background, which may change later. Then I scanned in the globe and the photo of women and children above it. I thought they would likely be the main points. Then bit by bit, I played with different things. I find it great fun and very absorbing, rather like a puzzle.

There are software progams that you can simply put your photos into; that is another way to go. But however you do it, a digital scrapbooking book can be a great memento.