Digital Scrapbooking: 4 Great Websites to Get You Started

Digital scrapbooking has taken on a whole new world of its own. While there are still die-hard paper scrappers out there and even some whom do both paper scrapbooking and digital scrapbooking, many people do strictly digital scrapbooking.

There are several advantages to digital scrapbooking versus paper scrapbooking. For instance, with digital scrapbooking there is no mess. All your supplies are stored right on your computer and if you’re in the middle of working on a layout and need to stop, you just save your project as it is and then you can come back to it at a later time. Another advantage to digital scrapbooking is the ability to burn your layouts to CD’s or DVD’s and hand them out to family and friends, as well as printing out multiple copies of your layouts and storing them in albums, or framing them and hanging them on your walls, or even giving them as gifts.

All you need to get started doing digital scrapbooking is a good photo program, such as Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements or Corel’s Paint Shop Pro. If you don’t have one of these programs but would still like to try your hand at digital scrapbooking you can download free trials of them at http://www.adobe.com/ or http://www.corel.com/.

For your other digital scrapbooking supplies you can visit hundreds of digital scrapbooking websites to find whatever it is you need. Here are four websites that are favorites of mine and of my fellow digi-scrapping friends.

Gotta Pixel – This website is one of my personal favorites. Here you will find tutorials for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Paint Shop Pro. You will also find a forum filled with helpful advice on anything and everything about digital scrapbooking. In the forums, you can also find the scrapbooking challenges. These are fun ways to learn more about digital scrapbooking, and they even offer freebies to those who participate in the challenges. Gotta Pixel also has a section of their website devoted to free, downloadable scrapbooking papers, elements, and kits. Their only requirement for downloading these wonderful freebies is that you have at least 30 posts in their forum before downloading.

Two Peas In A Bucket – On this website you will find message boards with all sorts of information and advice on digital scrapbooking, tips on perfecting your photos, great ideas for themed scrapbooking albums, and galleries to show off your layouts. They also offer weekly scrapbooking challenges and free, downloadable scrapbooking kits.

RAKScraps – RAKScraps is another personal favorite of mine. There are tons of free downloads on this site. Members can make their own kits, upload them to a filesharing site and then post the link to the download in a thread in the forum where other members can then download these kits and/or share their own. Their forums have a wealth of helpful information in them as well. They also have scrapbooking challenges and galleries where you can show off your layouts.

Scrapbook-bytes – This website offers the most tutorials out of the websites I’ve listed. You will find tutorials for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, Digital Image Pro and Photo Impact. I’ve found the tutorials on this site to be especially helpful when I’m trying to learn a new technique or when I’m making my own papers and elements. You can also find free downloads to get you started, as well as forums, chat rooms, contests, and a gallery.

Remember, there are hundreds of digital scrapbooking websites on the net, but these are just a few to help you get started.