Digital Scrapbooking Elements Review

The digital era has affected all in its reach, including the community of avid scrapbookers. No longer must you devote an entire room, or an entire paycheck, to all of your scrapbooking materials. Think of your craft table with the piles of paper, scissors, stickers, glue, tape, embellishments and other materials. Now, imagine your craft room after you have switched to a digital scrapbook elements web service. Spotless. All you need is a computer, a little time alone and your imagination.

Digital scrapbooking takes all of the traditional elements of physical scrapbooking online, allowing you to browse materials, purchase and download with ease. The best part? You’ll never run out of an element. You can open a new copy of the element every time you feel the urge to place that cowboy hat or jeweled star, as long as you maintain an unchanged saved copy of each scrapbooking element. No more running out in the middle of a project and scouring the craft store for that same color, size, and style of element. All of the elements you download are yours to keep forever and use in multiple scrapbook pages.

There are many fantastic web services, including Scrap Girls, MyMemories Suite and Peppermint Creative. Be prepared to spend some serious time perusing these sites for digital products. Once you have found the paper, embellishments and alphabets you need to create the perfect digital scrapbook page, you simply purchase them and download the digital scrapbook elements files onto your computer.

You will need to use an additional software application to design and create your digital scrapbook pages. We suggest using a photo editing software or application like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. In order to get truly professional results, you can also use Adobe Illustrator or InDesign to aid in the design process.

There are many other things you can do with these digital goodies, such as create photo books and slide shows. Your children can even use the digital elements to enhance book reports, video assignments and Science and History Fair projects. There is no end to the different uses for digital scrapbook elements. On this site you will find articles related to digital scrapbook elements as well as reviews to help you with the decision of which product is best for you.

Digital Scrapbooking Elements: What to Look For

If you’re new to the digital scrapbooking world, and particularly to using digital scrapbooking elements, digital scrapbooking embellishments, a digital scrapbook layout or digital scrapbook template, you need to know what to be on the lookout for as you browse the different sites. As we reviewed the various sites included in our list, we compared and considered each one based on the following criteria:

Selection
The best sites offer a varied selection of design styles, projects and tools – everything from pre-designed quick pages and albums to fonts, embellishments and backgrounds to the more unusual items like blog and Twitter graphics and calendars. Hybrid scrapping is another option to look for, as it is one of the new trends in digital scrapbooking.

Before purchasing any digital scrapbook elements coordinated kits or element, double check the quality of the download. If the elements aren’t provided in the proper resolution, you will be severely limited in how you can use them. Industry-standard resolution is 300dpi, and the formats should be JPEG or PNG. These two formats ensure transparency is preserved between layers of elements within Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. For example, if you drop a digital image of a paper clip on top of a background, you’ll still be able to see the background through the open portions of the paper clip.

Feature Set
We looked at the site, store and tutorial features, as well as the community element the site fostered. We were most impressed by sites that offered articles, news, free downloads, tutorials and access to an archive of past newsletters, freebies and other content. The more helpful information the site provided, typically the higher it ranked.

Community features are especially important. The scrapper's community is a fantastic opportunity for you to find new friends who share your interests. Together you can share ideas and receive general announcements about products and contests. The higher-ranked digital scrapbook elements sites provide numerous ways for the users, designers and site owners to interact. Blogs, chats, message boards, user galleries, forums and emailed newsletters all create a neighborhood that provides inspiration, guidance and help for scrappers and designers.

Instructions & Guides
While a digital scrapbook elements web service may be a one-stop-shop for all of your scrapbook paper, word art and embellishments, but it is not necessarily where you'll layout your scrapbook pages. Look for a site that has a tutorial section with videos or step-by-step instructions on uses your elements, place photos, add text, etc. within Photoshop. Also, look for a site that offers information on organizing your files and using a variety of software tools. Many sites have these resources in the form of user forums or blogs as well.

Ease of Use
The majority of the sites reviewed have wonderful layouts that are very user friendly. You can easily find all information about the digital scrapbook elements company, shipping prices and help and support options. Also considered in the digital scrapbooking elements review process was the ease of downloading and purchasing. Most of the sites require you to set up an account before you can download anything, but some go so far as limiting access to galleries, blogs and forums to “members only, " which makes it difficult for new users to get a feel for a the site’s benefits.

Free Downloads
Free. What an amazing word. Most digital scrapbook elements sites offer free downloads that range from individual elements to entire kits. These downloads are fantastic as they allow you a “try-before-you-buy” taste of the products the site has to offer before you invest much money.

Help & Support
Help and support options are always an important feature, and particularly so when you’re dealing with digital downloads. All of the digital scrapbook elements sites we reviewed had a support email address, but the best ones also had well-developed FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions). The community forum is also a great place to ask your fellow scrappers how to use specific Photoshop tools or learn exactly how they created a certain effect.

Give digital scrapbook elements a try – you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to be creative. At TopTenREVIEWS We Do the Research So You Don't Have To.™