A Guide To Put Your Scrapbooking Layouts Online

There are a lot of reasons why you would want to put your scrapbooking layouts online. You may want to share your newest album with family and friends or simply post a photo of a scrapbooking page onto your blog. If you want to be part of the online scrapbooking community, you can submit your layouts photos to a forum gallery. Lastly, a photo of your scrapbooking page can be entered into online contests, competitions or a scrapping challenge.

There are two methods to get your traditional scrapbook pages into a digital form. You can either use a digital camera to photograph the page or scan the page into your computer. Both methods can turn out an excellent photo of your scrapbooking page, but there advantages and disadvantages to each method.

Taking a photo of your page layout with a camera can be a challenge. You need to carefully consider the lighting for the photograph. It is best to use natural lighting, and to turn off your flash. The flash can cause reflections on the photographs and shiny elements of the page. The best place to take the photo with natural light is outdoors or indoors near a sunny window. To avoid distortions, hang or lean your page upright.

Once you have taken the photograph of your scrapbooking page, you will need to upload it to your computer. If you need to make corrections to the photo before you place it online, you can use any photo-editing software. You may also need to save the photo in a web-friendly size and format. Check with the site you are going to submit the photo for guidelines on image sizes.

If you are using a scanner to convert your scrapbooking page to a digital format, you will need to consider the size limitations of your scanner. Scanners are now very affordable. However, models that accommodate 12x12 pages are usually more expensive and less available.

Even if you do not have a scanner big enough to scan you layout, you can still use a standard flatbed scanner for your scrapbooking page. However, you will need to scan the 12x12 page layout in two sections. Once you have the two section of your page, you can use an image editing software, like Photoshop, to merge the two sections back together. This process is not an easy process and may take some trial and error to do this, but the results are usually of higher quality than using the digital camera method. If you are using a high-quality scanner, the scanned page layout will show truer, brighter colors and sharper images overall.

Most scrapbooking pages are three dimensional and use objects that are raised on the paper. These raised objects may cause shadows when you scan the page in a flatbed scanner. You may need to use your image editing software to correct these shadows caused during the scanning process. Scanning scrapbooking layouts takes practice, but once you've done it a few times, it often is quicker than the digital camera process.

Whether you choose the digital camera or the scanner, getting your scrapbook pages into a digital format is the first step towards getting them online. Sharing your pages on the internet allows you to become a part of the online scrapbooking community. Look for scrapbooking forums and build your own gallery of page layouts for others to see and discuss. You may even want to enter your page layouts in scrapbooking contests or submit them for publication. There are many ways to share your scrapbooking pages online.