digital scrapbooking with Pages

Hey, Esther, I would recommend it IF you willing to dedicate as much time with it as you do with regular scrapbooking and if you are willing to pay good money for processing the pages at a special graphic printing firm. (Not the local photo processor) —if you're tastes are like mine and you want it printed on quality print paper but not the glossy/matte photo paper at photo shops.

It can be memory intensive, esp if you want to hi-qualilty prints, so alot depends on how powerful your computer is.

Also I'd recommend Photoshop Elements as a cheap alternative to the pricey Photoshop proper. It's not as powerful (Elements, that is) but it can do a decent job and it's tutorial rocks, IMO.

But I have to say digital scrapbooking is fun, and you can do a lot with journaling and not have to worry about running out of Ts or Rs, or not spacing it just right — cuz you can go back fix and adjust.

Personally I do both because there is nothing to replace the feeling of holding a scrapbook in your hands and paging through it, but a digital scrapbook could be posted online (if you use low-res jpgs and don't make them so onerously large to download for viewers.

Good luck, and keep us posted.

Esther,

I haven't done digital scrapbooking, but I would recommend to have a look at Keynote and iPhoto.

Keynote' themes often have several pages with photo cut-outs and you can add text boxes for annotations.

iPhoto offers several themes to prepare books. You don't need to order them but you can save the result as PDF. Look at these tutorials for more information.

I have to say ditto to Peggy's remarks. Elements works just fine with Tiger. Perhaps you were looking at a version for PC? In any case, I like it much better for finer photo work than what you can get out of iPhoto.

Hello to all here,

I use Photoshop for my daily work, and so I think Elements is a very good app for the semiprofessional. But for all casual users, there is a free tool: Seashore. It is an app in progress but it is free and works fine. Have a look at: http://seashore.sourceforge.net/download.php.

Frank.

Yes, as others have said, both PE 2 and PE 3 should work just fine in Tiger. If you get PE and are interested in scrapbooking, you might want to take a look over at the Photoshop Elements User forums, which has a forum dedicated just to scrapbooking with PE.

What do you mean by "scrapbooking"?

I've used Keynote to make a presentation of my holiday pictures. Picked a nice theme with different styles, and also scanned in all my tickets etc to scatter on the slides as mementoes. People seemed to like it 🙂

I also wrote a trip diary, but I'm less happy with it. I used the default theme that came with Pages, and while nice for Italy it doesn't really suit China very well. I'vefiddling with something that looks more appropriate but haven't got the design down yet. Pages is also very slow when the file size gets over 100 megs (which it did -- even using only the best of 5000 pictures is a lot of pictures!).

OK, it sounds like Keynote is more what you want than Pages. Keynote lets you do things like have cutout areas for photos, while if Pages lets you do that I haven't found out how yet.

iBook G4, iMac G3 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Hello Robert,

the cutout areas for photos in Keynote are nothing else than images with alpha masks. So you can do this in Pages, too. Create an image with transparency (TIFF or PNG) and paste it into Pages. Then paste another image, place it behind the masking image and you have a cutout.

Frank.

Frank,

if you check some of the links Esther provided in her last posting, you'll see that often a landscape format is used. Also, those digital scrapbooks appear to me more like presentations than like text with pictures.

Due to that fact and because Keynote (in my opinion) offers more flexibility in arranging pictures and text, I suggested Esther in my first reply to have a look at Keynote.

Hello Matthias,

my reply was for Roberts post about cutouts. I wanted to show him that the cutouts are not a specific functionality of Keynote.

But you are right (in my opinion, too) that Keynote is a better choice for Esthers scrapbook than Pages in the meaning of presenting the book (also if it may be only for herself). I don't know scrapbook software, but I think there are no functions for a scrapbook that can't be mastered in Keynote. Hence it is a page based presenting software for media types and text.

Frank.

You will find that the main difference between Keynote and Pages will be the output. Keynote is set (usually) to 1024 by 768 pixels. When peinted at full page (8x10) you will end up with a pixellated image, especially if there are background graphics and such being used.

Pages is dedicated to printing and online-pdf generation. For printing you want higher quality graphics where the jaggie bits at the edges of cutouts is not as noticable. While your photograph may be of high quality, the images used for framing may not, especially if they are resized higher (You will notice the majority of the included templates use shapes outlines with thick white lines and shadows instead of cool frames?)

I've tried creating some pages templates with graphics from my old Keynote themes and they slowed the program down considerably. You may be able to create a page or two, but I certainly wouldn't expect to make an entire booklet with graphics used as backgrounds, frames or borders. Especially if those graphics were high enough quality to prevent jaggies.

I have been working with shapes for frames with very promising results. Hopefully there will be some available soon. Using the fill function will make things very interesting, if they fix the limitation for shape cutouts and the graphics which go behind them.

I don't the resolution is good enough for scrapbookers. I am printing out some newsletters and am disappointed with the quality of the photos. I know I am only using cardstock but the images are small and should be crisper. I can't imagine what a photo the size of a 4x6 or larger would look like.