Digital scrapbooking is one of the cheapest ways to stretch your scrapbooking budget and one of the best places to start is with digital scrapbook paper!

Digital scrapbook paper usually comes in 12x12 squares, just like traditional papers. Only with this scrapbook paper you can adjust it to your heart’s content. Not only that, you can blend multiple papers together to make your own custom scrapbook paper for all your projects.

Personalizing scrapbook paper is easy if you have a photo editing program that uses layers, like Photoshop or PaintShopPro. As long as you have layers…you can have custom scrapbook paper even with a mass distribution scrapbooking kit.

Click Here to Learn How to Blend Papers using Layer Masks

More Scrapbook Paper Ideas

Another idea for custom scrapbook paper is to create your own designs using matching digital scrapbook embellishments from a scrapbook kit.

Choose any fairly simple scrapbook paper background as your base. Then just ghost the elements on top instead of leaving them solid (100% opacity). You can take several embellishments, arrange them into a design you find pleasing for your project, and then set the opacity to something like 10-30% opacity.

You can also change the layer mode of each embellishment. For example, in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you can choose to set your mode to things like Overlay, Soft Light, Multiply or Luminosity. Each one will give a different effect as it lays over the original scrapbook paper base.

You can also choose to add styles to each layer if you want to colorize them further or even shift the colors using Hue & Saturation on each individual scrapbook embellishment.

Finalizing Your Custom Scrapbook Paper Designs

Once you’ve set up your scrapbook paper design to something you like, save your big working file with ALL your layers in case you want to ever come back and change the design.

From there you can start saving out as many variations of custom scrapbook paper as you like, shifting your base colors to make the same design in lots and lots of different colors. You can just shift the background using Hue & Saturation (directly or via a layer) or you can put a simple low-opacity color layer OVER the background for each color you’d like. Just be sure to SAVE SAVE SAVE your original once you are done with the creative play side of the job. 

Once you make your subtle color changes, then save each scrapbook paper out as a high quality JPEG or flattened TIFF. The JPEGS and TIFFS will NOT have all the layers saved with them, so they will be much smaller files than the original.

There you have it….tons of personalized scrapbook paper that won’t cost you a single extra penny!

Here's a sampling of what's avilable inthe store to get you started:

 

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