Don't Forget to Print!

Wow! One month! I am such a slacker. Well, not really. I have been keeping very busy. I am on our community's Canada Day Celebration committee and with Canada Day fast approaching we have been going non-stop getting ready! It has been a learning process for me. I have never been on this type of committee before and it really makes me appreciate how hard it is to organize a successful community event. Fund raising, insurance, permits, finding volunteers! It's no wonder that this will be our first event in over six years! All of the previous committee members quit years ago, so we were all new to this at the beginning. It looks like we will have a great day though - weather permitting! Keep your fingers crossed for me!

So on to my digital scrapbooking tip for today: Don't forget to print!

You might be wondering why I would even need to mention this. (Especially you traditional scrappers out there!) I am mentioning this because I am sure there are other digiscrappers out there who are just like me.

We take some awesome shots (or mediocre shots that we plan to Photoshop!) on our digital cameras and then proceed to upload said shots to our computer. We play with the pictures in Photoshop. We create beautiful scrapbook pages. We save a print quality copy. We save a web quality copy. We upload our creations to Facebook, our on-line gallery and our blogs. We email our pages to family and friends. Our kid does something cute and we run for the camera. Rince and repeat!

I guess there is nothing wrong with this cycle if you are cool with booting up the computer every time you have company who would like to look at your scrapbooks. Personally, I hate people entering my computer/spare room. Especially when I have been on a creative streak because that means my housework streak was non-existant! My other problem (which is more rare, but also much more destructive) is having a computer genious for a husband. You might think this would be an advantage. You would be wrong! The words I dread more than any others, "I think I'll do a reformat and a clean install tonight." To those of you who don't speak geek - that means every file you have saved on your hard drive will be deleted! I haven't even mentioned computer crashes or viruses. See the importance of prompt printing now?

I discovered that I have to do a little tweaking to print my scrapbook pages at a standard photo centre. Most of the photo centres near me are unable to print a square image. (I did find one photography store that can print them, but they charge me almost $8 for one 8x8 image). The trick is to create your scrapbook page and then change the canvas size to match a standard print size. For example: to print a 8x8 page, the closest standard print size is 8x10. I create my 8x8 page just like normal in photoshop and when I am finished I change the canvas size to 8x10 (click Image - Canvas size or keystroke Alt+Ctrl+C and change the height to 10) and save it as a high resolution jpeg. The photo centre can print the 8x10 image without any problem (and for about $2-3) and then I just trim the white strip off and pop it into my album.


I did find a printing site today that I am going to try out. http://www.scrappingsimply.com/ It is an American site, but their pricing is great and they have a flat shipping fee of $5 (even to Canada)! They also offer all of the standard scrapbook sizes including 12x12 prints! I will let you know how it goes.