Crop Corner

Mini scrapbooks can be about almost any theme imaginable. Here are some ideas to get you started. Use words, phrases or quotes that are preprinted on vellum or stickers as accents and journaling solutions. Keep pages simple for a look that will stand the test of time. Use a border design throughout to give consistency to your project. Try a monochromatic color scheme with various cardstock and pattern paper. Create backgrounds using a stamped design on each page. Use stickers and faux three-dimensional accents to keep your album from becoming too bulky.

To make a multicolor coil, glue a strip of one color to the end of strip of another color; use as many colors as you want and twirl as usual. Tight Curls: Twirl the end of a strip of paper with your tool. Wiggle the tool out gently and you will have a tight curl. Loose Curls: Curl the strip with the tool and then use your fingers to stretch the curl out into a looser curl.

There are times when I am glad that this column is based on wildlife photography! Mainly because, for the most part, the cycle is fairly predictable. Every year Spring turns to Summer, Summer to Autumn, Autumn to Winter and so on. Yes, there are the occasional glitches, like the week of snow in the spring this year that killed off the regularly featured kingfisher on ePHOTOzine but generally, life in the countryside has a well-defined pattern. I would hate to be trying to predict what the human population would be up to over the next month considering the extreme highs and lows of the last few weeks!

When trying to choose a topic for a mini album about look the special days marked on your calendar. This may help you find something you want to remember with the gift of a scrapbook. Choose Your Photos - Choose photos based on the theme of your scrapbook and the type of gift project that you are creating. If you are making a small scale scrapbook, you will need to choose your photos accordingly. Use only the best photos that you have and keep the number of photos small and manageable. You can add many other items that have meaning, such as other memorabilia, journaling and things like quotes, poems and sayings.

From his or her first haircut to the first day of preschool, those early childhood years are full of wonderful experiences--both for you and your child. It's a wonderful time to be a parent, and a wonderful time to capture in a scrapbook. Yet this stage in your child's life can seem to go by so quickly. Wondering how a busy parent can preserve those memories? From photo ideas to journaling tips, we've got a few parent-tested ideas to get you started! As with any scrapbook, you have a couple of choices for album organization. You might scrapbook your photos chronologically. This is perfect if your child is a toddler right now. If you're going back and scrapbooking early childhood photos of someone who's older, you might opt for a "chapter" sequence, where you group photos by section rather than chronological order. In this case, you might have a chapter for "Likes and Dislikes", "Milestones" and "Events and Occasions".

Some holidays make coming up with a color scheme so simple! For this Fourth of July layout, it was easy to carry the red, white and blue color scheme throughout the page with patriotic-themed papers, ribbons and fabric stickers. These colors coordinate with the colors in my photos, and I even printed my journaling in multiple colors to emphasize this theme. LeNae chose a red, white and blue color scheme to coordinate with the patriotic theme of this layout. She used a patterned paper strip as a border down the right side of the page and layered photos on top, matting the photos on white so they stand out from the colored background. She then computer journaled onto white cardstock in black, blue and red ink, and double-matted the journaling on red and navy blue cardstock. Finally, LeNae added strips of ribbon, star-shaped brads and fabric stickers as embellishments.

If youve ever had a large group of photographs that were in one format (such as a number of images scanned in as TIFs) and you needed them to be in another format (such as JPGs for use on a website), then you know how time consuming this task can be if you have to convert each file individually. The same thing goes for converting a number of photographs from one size and/or resolution to another or renaming a bunch of files. Photoshop Elements gives you the ability to quickly convert multiple files from one file format to another or from one size and resolution to another. Elements also makes it easy to rename multiple files as well. These are known as batch tasks; i.e. operations on a batch of photographs simultaneously.