We have a great tip for you to use an imperfect photo in your next scrapbook page, plus it’s the season for scrapping those back to school layouts.
Unless you are a professional photographer or really, really knowledgeable or experienced, you will have an imperfect photo or two or six hundred in your files!
No matter how much we want it, our photos don’t always turn out as we’d hope.
Nowadays with digital camera you can delete photos you are not happy with as you go along. However, many times we are scrapbooking photos taken years ago when you didn’t know there was a problem until you got your pack of photos back from the developer. And in those days we did not take dozens of photos of the same subject because we did not want to pay for them all to be developed. With modern digital cameras we can take hundreds of photographs and be selective about which we print.
One of the typical mistakes is not looking at the background before you snap. I have loads of photos where I’ve made this mistake. I know about it, but still don’t always remember to look out for it before I press the shutter.
With digital photos and a good photo-editing program you can erase many of the offending telegraph poles, tree branches and busy backgrounds, etc. But what can you do if you don’t have access to these fancy tools?
We’ve made a ‘back to school’ scrapbook layout using a photograph of an old photograph of Isabella’s son the day he started school. This was by way of ‘digitalising’ the image.
Copying in this manner wasn’t a great success, as you can see. The photo shows some of the background it was sitting on when photographed, so the first thing was to crop it to remove the unwanted edges. A scanner would have made a better job, but may not have given such a high resolution result. (The photo on the layout, even although it is cropped, is bigger than the original.)
Also in this photo, the bookcase behind the child is stuffed full of all sizes and colors of books, and there’s a collection of jugs and other treasures on top of it too. It made the photo too busy and detracted from the subject which was David, ready for his first day at school, and wearing the leather schoolbag that was his Dad’s when he started school almost thirty years earlier.
In Photoshop Elements, Isabella removed the color to make the image black and white, and then duplicated the photograph 5 times.
For a paper layout you can use a scanner to copy the image to black and white, then print out the copies you need.
Isabella then placed each photo to overlap the one next to it to hide the busy-ness. As this wasn’t possible with the main colored photo, she used embellishments to hide the area she didn’t want seen – a ribbon fragment (‘caution’), a large button (‘big boy’) and a torn card with the title ‘Off to School’.
Journaling was added below the photographs, and a ‘torn edge’ completes the layout.
This layout used the following products:
SNU_SchoolDays_12×12_BulletinBoard Special to coordinate with the SchoolDays Collection
Plus these:
Digital scrapbooking products can be printed to use on paper layouts. If your printer cannot print to card, then to get a good weight for embellishments, print the images you want on paper, glue to card and cut the shapes out together. It’s much easier than cutting everything out twice!
And, of course, the reason you’d want to use imperfect photos on back to school scrapbook pages or any other layout is because it’s the one that tells the story and that’s what scrapbooking is all about, isn’t it?
