Hi Scrapbook Friend,
Kathy and I received a great question today from one of our members. It’s one we see from time-to-time, so I thought that I would pass on the answer here too for all to share in.
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Kathy and Wes,
I wanted to let you know that I love your scrapbook pages.
I am having a problem importing my pictures to fit the frame. Can you please let me know what I’m doing wrong.
Thanks for your help
Tracy
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Hi Tracy,
Great question and not an uncommon one either. As digital cameras continue to improve in both quality and max resolution, it’s easy to have your images come into your scrapbook page and cover the whole thing up.
Normally, digital scrapbook pages are made at somewhere between 150 and 300 dpi (dots per inch). Making them more than 300 dpi usually just makes for a much larger file than needed as 300 is the max true capability of most color printers… especially the ones used in photo stores and book publishers.
What that means is that if you have taken your images with a 3 or more mega-pixel camera, your images will be more than 300 dpi (effective on your page) and will be much larger than the pages you are creating.
This isn’t a problem though; you just need to shrink them down by dragging the corners when the image is selected or use the cropping tool to remove the excess parts of the image so it will fit your frame opening.
What Kathy and I do is to first open the images we will be using on the page one at a time. We then shrink them down close to what they need to be, usually leaving them a bit larger… just in case. We then save them as a new file on the computer so that we keep the original in tact. If we ever need a larger image, we still have it that way.
Now, we open the scrapbook page and import the new smaller images to the page and do the final sizing and cropping.
In the rare instance that your image comes in smaller, such as when it’s been taken with one of the low resolution children’s digital cameras, you can enlarge it by up to about 25% in most cases with out too much pixilation. By that I mean that as you make a digital image larger, the digital pixels are actually square and if you make it too large, the squares begin to show in the image. We call that pixilated.
If you need to make it larger than about 25%, then here’s one thing you can do. Print a copy of the image on a photo quality printer or have one printed for you. Then, scan the image in at a very high resolution. My scanner lets me go up to 3200 pixels. Depending on how big you want to make it, you may only need to scan it at 800 or 1200.
What that does is makes the pixels in the new digital image denser and in effect makes the image larger than it really is for your digital scrapbook page.
It’s the digital version of what they used to do to enlarge prints (and still do for really big prints) where they would make a large negative of the small image and then blow it up on the photo enlarger lens. You are just doing the equivalent digitally.
Hope this gives you some good ideas and a path to success for your digital scrapbook pages.
Just let us know if you have any other questions…
Wes
www.PrincessCrafts.com
(877) 751-6368
5505 Whipshaw Rd.
Peyton, CO 80831
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