I recently stumbled on this site and am thrilled to see such great work!

I want to get started... problem is that i have no idea what, where, how!

I have Adobe Illustrator & photoshop as well as Macromedia Fireworks and Freehand. I have experience in graphics.

I have a Sony Mavica DSCV1. and have used digital cameras for 4 years.

I am hoping to find a way to organize all my pictures and scrapbook them.

Here is my wish list for advice.
I would ideally like to be able to
organize my volumes of pictures for searching by keyword, date, etc print pictures in multiple sizes easily rotate, crop, etc without decreasing picture quality do basic editing create scrapbooks (as in multiple page creations) create web pages easily and quickly

Any ideas or suggestions?

I don’t think photoshop and paint shop pro will create documents of multiple pages will it? These programs also do not organize well.

Please p*** on tips as I am frustrated by the lack of organization and want to start creating beautiful digital memories!!!

Thanks
Dawn

Welcome Dawn!

First, I would suggest signing up for the e-zine. Shelleyrae wrote a great article in there about organizing your digital photos.

Second, by cropping or rotating, you won't decrease picture quality. The only way that would happen is if you increased the size or saved is as a .jpg over and over.

I suggest reading this thread
http://www.scrapbook-bytes.com/chat/...=2027#post2027


Also, try out the photoshop tutorials. There is a wealth of info there.

Lastly, ask away! We are hear to help you!

Welcome!

Definitely read the ezine article on photo organization. It's hugely helpful.

Also, check out Photoshop Album. It's a great program for organization too.

And welcome!

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Suzanne

Acdsee is a fabulous photo organisational tool. Most computers have a freebie version ..the full version is much more powerful. YOu can read about it here: http://www.acdsystems.com/English/index.htm

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Thanks for the information so far. I am still stumbling to get organized and feel like I MUST DO THAT FIRST!!! I am committed to it. With over 4 years of digital images, i am swimming in a m*** of CDs and cannot find anything now!

Dawn

I have been playing with Photoshop after years of not using it (much better with Fireworks!).

I cannot figure out how to combine photos on one page. I have some that are smaller after cropping and some that are way large. So they are not in proportion. Once i place them in the document, i cannot resize them? Since they become layers? I want them to be objects!!

Also I saw all the elements on here... what are they, how do you use them with Photoshop?

Is photoshop or Illustrator better for this type of work?

thanks
Dawn

This is just a personal opinion, but I L-O-V-E PS!! I had it on my computer for a few years and was always "scared" to mess with it. It seemed such a daunting and overwhelming program and I had no clue where to begin with it.

Although, now I can say I am a PS junkie! PS can do soooo much and it can do more than I can even imagine and possibly begin to comprehend.

It helped me out a lot when I went and bought a book "Cl***room in a Book" or something like that for PS.

As for resizing the pictures...once they're in your document they become a layer. This layer becomes your object. If you hit control T when the layer is highlighted on the right-hand side of your screen you should see a box come around your picture that you can use to resize. If you hold down the shift key while you're resizing it will keep your picture in proportion and you won't have to worry about funky looking pictures from your resizing them.

As for the elements. You just save them to your hard drive or wherever you feel like saving your elements (I have a secondary hard drive that I use for this and frequently burn all my elements and SB pages to CD). When you want to use them just locate the file you want with the PS File Browser (top right side - it's a tab up there) or open up Windows Explorer, locate the file and right click and choose Open with PS, and it should open up the element you want and create a "layer" for it in your document. From there you can change colors, add filters, add shadows and beveling, etc, just have fun with it to your hearts content!

I hope that helped!

Shari

When you have your document open and when it is a document with several photos (layered photos that is) click on the menu at the top "Winow" and go down and choose "layers" this will open up a box on the screen which will show each layer that you have and you can also see a small thumbnail version of that layer. To resize the object/picture you will have to select that particular layer choose your layer from the box click on it (it should highlight that layer) then go to the top menu and select "edit" go down to "transform" to the right a submenu will form choose "scale" this should put a box around the object you want to transform to keep the same proportion when resizing hold your shift key down while using the mouse to change the size of the object. I hope this helps if you need more details just let me know.

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