Hello,
My name is Alissa and I just started thinking about scrapbooking the digital way when I went to a scrapbook store and was overwhelmed by all the choices expense of buying all the embellishments etc. This seems like a good option and for me, having the option of UNDO! would be a great thing. I am very excited and my husband, who is a designer and an architect, has recommended that I use Adobe's In Design instead of Photoshop (we have both). I was wondering if you have any recommendations about this. He says that In Design is easier for layouts, especially if you want to make both pages flow together. I guess it is used for magazines and stuff. If anyone has any input on which of these two programs I should use, I would appreciate it! Thanks!
Alissa

Hi Alissa! Welcome to the world of digital!

I have been in the graphic design industry for a few years now, and we use InDesign at work daily. InDesign is a great layout program - we use it to set up ads, flyers, programs, brochures, business cards etc etc. So you are right, it is a great program for layout design.

For all of my digital scrapping, though, I use Photoshop. The reason is this: with Photoshop, you have much more control over manipulating your photos, papers and elements. InDesign cannot fix red-eye, create a metal eyelet, recolour a pre-made element or change a photo to black & white instead of colour. You have so many more options for scrapping with Photoshop.

If you were to use InDesign, I would think you would ALSO need Photoshop. You could manipulate your photos and elements in Photoshop, then save and import them into InDesign, where you could arrange them on your page as desired.

Also, if you were to send your layouts to be printed via an online photo service (or put them on a disk and take them somewhere to get printed), you would then need to save the InDesign layout as an eps or PDF, then open it in Photoshop and save it as a jpg.

Hope this helps!

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Thank you so much for responding, that really helped and I have been experimenting with Photoshop all day. Most of the things I have done have been with the tutorials on this website. I did go to scrappersguide.com and I got a video (I assume it plays on a CD) that is going to give me a lot of inside tips into using Photoshop. Hopefully it was a good investment since it is a very complicated program and my husband is so good with it that he can barely bring it down to my level. I know now how to create a scrapping doc and also to bring a pic in and how to manipulate it. However, I was wondering, how would I create a layer underneath the photograph layer that I could use as a sort of frame or matte to put the photo on. Hope you understand what this means! Thanks for the help!
Alissa

Hi Alissa!

Although I use PSE, I think the idea is the same in all programs. You need to go to Layers at the top and click on new. Then in your layers pallet on the right side, drag that layer so that it is below your photo. Then you can use the rectangle tool to create a matte. HTH!!

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I love InDesign! Sadly I don't have access to it anymore since I'm not in school, but it was such a great program. If you don't need to do photo manipulation, it might be a lot easier than PS - it would be interesting to see what you could do with it. Since it's so friendly with PS anyway, you could always bring pieces back and forth between the two programs.

Give it a try, it might work better than expected.

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Hi Alissa,

Your question about putting a matt below a photo. I may have my picture in my workspace but usually start out with a background paper or blank page and paste my photo onto it. You will now have 2 layers, a background and a picture. You can create a new layer and drag it between the background and a picture. You can put a piece of paper on it and manipulate it to look like a matt, or, make a selection around the picture and fill it which will create a frame. I hope this helps, I'm primarily PSP, I do use PS also, however, my language may be a bit PSP accentric, but I think the layers work very similarly.

Laurie

you could also open a new document with a white background and then open your pic and drag it on to the background layer. Make sure the image size of the pic is the exact same as your background. Then once it is dragged over centre it so that you can't see the background and hold the ctrl button and E to merge the layers. Go up to Image on the the menu bar and then go to canvas size. In the canvas size window enter the dimensions of the matte you want.....if you want 1/2" all around your photo enter .5 in both fields and hit ok. This will give you a perfect matte every time and you don't have to fiddle with it to make sure your pic is centred on the matte. Then you can drag the matted pic onto you LO. I hope that helped too.....the others have great ideas too. Oh and if you want to change the colour of the matte just use the bucket tool and your colour pallet