Digital Scrapbooking 101

What "Finding Photo Flow" Is

I’ve had a few people ask me what I mean by “photo flow.”  Let me start by sharing what Photo Flow is not: A one-size fits all workflow solution.

Workflow is a term that is used by many when describing working with your photos.  On the professional photography circuit you can find class after class of photographers sharing their personal photo workflow. 

Workflow involves software, it involves steps and process (star ratings, keywords, etc.) and often a “best practice” idea of what works.  Students learn this workflow and then go home and apply it step by step in their workflow with a few tweaks.

While Photo Flow does involve some of these things (i.e. you can choose to use star ratings & keywords in your photo flow), it is very different.  There is no "best practice" involved in Finding Photo Flow.  

Finding Photo Flow is kicking things up a notch to work on a higher level.  It's more about how you feel about your workflow.  It’s about looking at a bucket full of blocks, each block representing a step you could choose to add to your workflow, but don’t necessarily have to.  It's about creativity. It’s about being engaged, happy and excited to work with your photos and building a process for yourself that supports that.

Most photo organization classes focus on how many photos you can keyword, rate, and print during class.  While the end goal of Finding Photo Flow is to help you process images and create amazing results, the four weeks in this class are about thinking, inspiring and creating an amazing workflow that will last long after the initial excitement fades.

After teaching photo organization for years, the one thing that gets to me is students who have followed my work all this time and write to me again and again saying, “This is it. I know what I need to do. This time it is going to stick and I’ll get caught up with my photos.”

Finding Photo Flow  came out of my thoughts of how to help students find something that "sticks."  In my own life there have been times when I have tried to adopt something someone else was doing because it looked amazing, and yet I never could keep it up for the long haul.  The lesson I learned from that was this: When you try to do something over and over again and it doesn’t stick, the reality is you just haven’t yet found flow.

Finding Photo Flow is about looking at your time, the current season of your life and then creating photo flow that supports that.  It’s about letting go and enjoying.  It doesn't matter if your workflow is highly complex or completely simplified, what matters most is that it engages you and supports your creativity.

Finding Photo Flow is about taking the time to absorb different ways of doing things in your workflow.  I want you to think about what is working now with your photos and creating a simple system that is sustainable.  A process that doesn’t overwhelm and at the same time gives you what you want from your photo library.

Quite simply, Finding Photo Flow is about finding joy in your photo library.  It's about inspiring creativity.

I hope to see you in the classroom!  You can learn more about Finding Photo Flow here.

 

 

 

VIDEO TUTORIAL: Project 365 and Biograffiti Templates - Are You In?

by Kayla Lamoreaux

With the start of 2010, many in the digital community will be thinking about Project 365...A photo a day for 2010. A LOT of photos to scrap and what better way to accomplish that than with templates?

Scouring the web for tutorials, I chose Biograffiti's 365 templates because of the detail and customization - I love that you can clip your photos to layers and automatically have custom glow/drop shadows and details that would have taken hours... You can also customize the templates with colors to match your photos and even remove the tags to transform the template into a regular layout template. How economical is that? The templates are available for both 12x12 and 8.5x11.

There is a different template layout for each week of the month and a new 365 template kit for each month. You will never run out of options and fun!

I have done tutorials for both Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop Elements. Hope you enjoy and have a wonderful and amazing New Year!

Learn how to work with advanced digital scrapbooking templates in Photoshop Elements 8.

Learn how to work with advanced digital scrapbooking templates in Photoshop CS4.
I also wanted to share with you all a bit more about Molly Weight, the genius behind Biograffiti (you can also find her on Facebook, Her Blog, and Store).
About Me/ About Biograffiti:
Biograffiti (bi·og·ra·phy·ti) noun:
An artistic account and written history of a person’s life.

Biograffiti specializes in creating layered photoshop templates for use in digital scrapbooking. I create album templates and single layouts, many complete with titles and journaling prompts. Personalize them by adding your own photos, journaling, papers and elements. In no time at all you’ll have a creative album that can be printed and bound like a coffee table book or have the pages printed individually and add them to a scrapbook style binder or frame them and hang on the wall.

A little more about *me*…
I’ve always loved to scrapbook. Before the word scrapbook was even used, before there were scrapbooking stores, before cute paper and trendy albums I was scrapping. I still have my first album made in the early nineties when I was 15. It’s a huge plain book that came preassembled with about 50 construction paper type pages. It’s filled with school pictures from all my high school friends, dried roses from boys, old newspaper clippings, notes from friends, old balloons taped to pages with photos and stories and many other memories I probably would have forgotten about had it not been for this memory book. Through the years my style has changed and evolved and I moved to digital scrapbooking. I love looking back at old pages and being whisked away to that very moment in time. I scrapbook to capture life’s moments and to leave a legacy so that the future generations of my family will know me, my husband, my daughter and the life we lived. It’s my way of telling our story.

I’m married to a kind hearted, down to earth, laid back, mountain man. We’ve been together ten years and have a sweet little girl who’s going to be two this year! We live in the beautiful state of Utah and try to escape the city and get up to the mountains as often as possible. Things that make me happy: camping, live music, bluegrass festivals, saturday mornings snuggling in bed with my hubby and daughter, girly giggles and high pitched squeals, good friends, good beer and good times.

How I got started in digital scrapping:
It was around 2001, the same year I learned how to use a computer. This was really old school digital scrapping with just colors + clip art. LOL. I started digi scrapping because for two major reasons 1) I could create one layout and give a copy to my mom, sisters, etc. 2) My layouts were forever now. With digital I don't have to worry about losing layouts. I back up all my JPG layouts to smugmug which means even if my computer crashes I will still have my layouts. (I use a mac though. so we all know my computer won't be crashing!!! LOL).

I got started creating templates after my daughter was born in 2007 but I just started selling in September 2009. My first big template project was my Baby's First Year book. I'm more of an album scrapper than a layout scrapper and I love creating photobooks for my family for gifts. I want coordinating books though and it was pretty easy to find 10 page albums but I had a hard time finding full 20 page albums. So, I started designing my own. I'm also a total photo scrapper and a simple scrapper. While I love layering and clusters, I just don't have the time and I want the focus of my page to remain the photos. With that in mind my templates are designed so that the layouts look great and complete without adding a bunch of extra stuff. I mean, don't get me wrong, you can still cluster, layer and dress them up but if you don't they're your layout is still going to look fabulous.

****************************************