How to Organize Your Photos for Your Next Scrapbooking Project
by Anne ~ July 6th, 2009. Filed under: How To.
The photograph is one of the most essential elements in scrapbooking. These provide the pages not only with visually pleasing elements, but are also one of the best and most concise ways of capturing a moment. Just as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, because some scrapbook artists find themselves with a surplus of photographs, determining which ones get into the pages should be considered well.
Photographs now accessible: One of the essential issues to address in scrapbooking is how to organize your photos. Today, most cameras are also digital, which means that photographs are cheaper because they can be stored in memory cards that are now available up to several gigabytes, which translates to thousands of photographs.
Good storage system: Begin organizing your photos with a good storage system. If you print out your photos or use film-type cameras, invest in good photo storage boxes that come with many pockets and compartments for storing your photographs. Make sure the box is made from acid free material, because acids react with chemicals in the photographs, making the pages yellow in no time also making the paper fragile. For those who store digital photographs, an external hard-drive may be a wise choice especially if you take plenty of high-resolution pictures which use more digital space. Once you have ample storage space, sort through the photographs and arrange them either by date or by theme.
Determine which to keep: The next step to organizing your photographs is to determine which photographs are worth keeping and which may be disposed of. Remember that not all photographs are needed for a scrapbook, and in the end, only a select few will make the final cut. Look at the quality of the picture and the elements captured in it to determine whether it should be kept or not. Some photos are taken against the light and are hardly usable. Retain these types of photographs only if there are no other photographs of the same events and if the photograph captures an essential once-in-a-lifetime moment.
Photo editing: Photo cropping and editing is another important task in organizing your photographs for your scrapbook. With digital photographs, you can easily crop images using computer programs such as Adobe Photoshop to cut out unnecessary space. With this photo editing software, you can even improve and enhance the quality of your photographs, by adjusting factors such as the hue, brightness, and contrast of an image. With film-type cameras, however, be sure that you take each photograph carefully especially since editing these photos involves more complicated dark-room techniques, or basic cropping with a pair of scrapbooking scissors - which will not address issues such as too-dark photographs or loss of contrast. Also, avoid photographs with fuzzy images such as objects and people in motion.
With a well-organized collection of photographs for your next cricut scrapbook project, the ideas and designs will be easier to generate since you will be working on specific and good-quality images. Remember that your pile of unsorted photos won't organize themselves - so start now.
