Thursday, August 20, 2009

Getting Started

So many people have told me how much they would love to try digital scrapbooking, blah, blah, blah and I always send them over to this blog and wish for them that they really would take it up because it is AWESOME. And I'm sure I've already listed off the numerous advantages to digiscrapping over tradition scrapping. (My top reason is that it's very kid friendly in that there's no mess for them to get into AND you can print off copies of your pages for each of them, should they so desire).

But anyway, today I was on the phone with my aunt and she was being very kind and saying nice things to me and in the course of our conversation, she said that she would love to try digiscrapping but that at this point she wouldn't even know where to get started. So I thought, "Hey, I should blog about how to get started." But then I realized that getting started actually *is* kind of hard. I mean, if you're trying to do this with Photoshop, there *is* a learning curve. I believe that Photoshop Elements is a little more straight forward to use - not to mention MUCH less expensive - but I'm not sure of that because I haven't actually used Elements.

I learned Photoshop on the job. In fact, in my previous working life, I also used PageMaker, Quark, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and probably other similar software apps that I'm not remembering at the moment. So by the time I took up digiscrapping, I already kinda knew what I was doing.

Truthfully I *have* learned lots of new tricks in the last couple of years. Maybe because playing around with Photoshop for hobby purposes allows me to just tinker around, whereas before I felt more pressure to get things done quickly. I'm not sure. But anyway, point is, I guess I'm not really so much help in this department because it's been a long time since I first started using Photoshop. And even though I'm no guru (I'm not trying to be humble, it's true), I can't really remember the process of how I learned either. But, I will say this, there are TONS of tutorials available. The web is amazing in this regard - ask and ye shall receive. So while I'm sure getting started is intimidating, I think you should just jump in and go for it. Choose your software and if it happens to be Adobe Photoshop, I would happily answer your questions. Though, more than likely that would mean a google search on my end. *hehe*

I would love to have some friends who were into it too. When I went through my Creative Memories phase, I LOVED attending scraps and getting together with girlfriends to work on our pages. I keep hoping that maybe someday I'll have a similar digiscrapping network because it was definitely a lot of fun. I miss it.

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