What Digital scrapbooking software are you using and why?
I’m looking to buy and would love input from other scrapbookers doing digital work.
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Photoshop is the best; hard to learn though
I also like Microsoft Picture It, but that’s a really old program and I don’t know if it’s even available anymore.
I started with Photoshop and got pretty good at it, but it was so hard to learn! I found a company called Heritage Makers where you build your pages online and then they print them into books. It’s so much easier to learn and there are even some features that Photoshop doesn’t have. In fact, I love it so much that I joined the company and now help other people get started. You can even sign up for a free account (no obligation) to try it out. You can either go to HeritageMakers.com to sign up, or sign up under me at http://heritagemakers.com/233144. I’d love to help!
If you’re a beginning, try using CropMom at http://www.cropmom.com. It’s an online scrapbooking site, just perfect for someone learning to make digital scrapbook pages. Just upload your photos and use CropMom’s graphics to create beautiful pages. There’s no software or kits to buy. If you like what you’ve created, you can purchase the print-quality JPEG file of your layout for a small fee then print it at home or have it printed by a photo service. The graphics that are available at CropMom are some of the same designer graphics that are sold to the regular digital scrapbooking community, so it’s high quality.
If you’re sure you want to invest the time and money into digital scrapbooking, the purchase Adobe Photoshop Elements or Corel Paint Shop Pro software. Either one will work well, and they work with the industry-standard digital scrapbooking kits. Both Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop Elements have a steep learning curve. Digital scrapbooking is not necessarily easy to learn to do. There are tutorials that can help.
A word of caution: Some (but not all) software that bills itself as “digital scrapbooking software” actually has proprietary files, so you can’t go out to ScrapArtist (http://www.scrapartist.com) or any of the other digital scrapbooking stores, and buy a kit and use it. So if you don’t use CropMom and decide to buy software, make sure it can read and use transparent .png files, which are the standard file format used in digital scrapbook embellishments.