#2 Make your own digiscraps- customised brads «

Well, you’ve got an image editor (see previous post) and you want to make some custom brads. You will probably like to have a plug-in to make it easy. A plug-in is a small software extension that can be downloaded, usually free of charge, to add capabilities to an existing programs such as Photoshop or Serif Photoplus, etc.

To make brads and buttons I use Border Mania. A free downloadable plug-in. Download the file, and install into the plug-in folder that is found in your image editor folder.

Now start your program, create a new image 2 inches height and width, with resolution set at 300, fill with the colour or picture of your choice. The fill icon can be found in the tool bar- it is the picture of a bucket.

Now from the Image menu select the Plug-in Filters option. Then find Border Mania. There are many button making filters to play with in this menu.

For round brads the last three options are great. “Round Button #1 or #2″ for conventional shapes, or “Round Button #3″ to make an eyelet. After you have selcted your filter you can mess around with the different parameters to get the brad you like.

Then after pressing okay, using the round select tool in the tool bar, select the actual button and then from the Image menu select “crop to image”. You should now have your brad.

If you were to now use this image it would look a bit rough around the edges on your page. So, in the Image menu, choose ‘Blur’, then choose ‘Gaussian blur’. Again you need to fiddle with the options to get a balance between blur and sharpness that is acceptable. You can apply this a few successive times, with a decreasing radius each time to get a good image.

Now you are ready to use your brad… well almost. If you are making up your Scrap pages in another program such as Canon Photo Record (it was free with my camera), you need to ‘Export’ your image so it is in a recognisable format that supports transparent regions.

Choose Export from the File menu, then select where you want to save image to, then select in ’save as type’ the ‘portable network graphics .png’ option. There you go!