#3 Make your own digiscraps- textured papers- part 1

There is a couple of ways to do this. The first method involves either going out and taking pictures of interesting textures- such as fence palings, grass, gravel, pebbles etc, or downloading textured image that a photographer has released for public download (please read their conditions of use). You can find such images here: The Ephemeral Victorian, The Lune Rouge and Wetfish scraps. Please note if there is conditions for commercial or personal use and ABIDE BY THEM.

• If the photo you have taken or downloaded is coloured, open it in Serif Photoplus ( or your image editor), select the Image menu, then Adjust, then Grayscale.  
• Now open a new or existing image 12″ x 12″, 300 resolution. If a its new image, fill with the colour of your choice.
• Now open your texture image file, copy.
• Now go back to 12″ image, select paste new layer. If smaller than 12″, stretch to fit, or tile it.  Your textured image should overlay your ‘paper’ now
•  Go to your layer manager tab- making sure the texture layer is on top and selected.  Now muck around with the options in the layer properties drop down box, and the opacity value.
• Find something you like save it or export it under another file name and keep playing.. you can get a plethora of papers!!

Let me know if this is helpful… And please always read the conditions of use when downloading images from the net! DON’T BE  A PIRATE!

#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!

• If you want to add a drop shadow or add a bevel edge before you save, choose the ‘Layers’ menu and then the ‘Effects’ option.

Thats all for now! Just experiment lots with the filters- its the best way to learn.  Let me know if you find this helpful.

#1 Make your own digiscraps- getting started.

This is not a how-to step by step make your own digiscraps, but what you can get from the internet -FREE – to do so.

So you don’t want or can’t afford to buy programs like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro? There are free image editing programs around. I use Serif Photo plus, which is an older version of the program that the company sells. They have this older version available for free download from their site. There is also a Photoshop copy called GIMP. I haven’t used this so I am not sure of the stability.

The Serif Photo plus program allows you to open and work with many different file formats such as JPG & PNG. It also works with layers in your images- very important. The ability to work with PNG files is important, as unlike JPEG files they allow areas of transparency- important for embellishments which are not rectangular or square.

 You can also use the program to put together your own pages using designer’s scrapbook layout templates. Although the disadvantage here is that if they are a Photoshop template -while you will be able to open them, the layers will not be separated- but you can ’separate’ them yourself. More on that later.

 Next time: What you need to make buttons & brads.