Digital Scrapbooking Business - Vital Tools of the Trade?

Your digital scrapbooking business has many advantages over traditional scrapbooking when you're just starting out, not least of which is the low investment required.

For a start, you don't need a garage full of scrapbook supplies like papers, punches, stamps, ribbons, binders... the list can seem almost endless!

Aside from your computer - which you've already got or how would you be here - there is very little extra you need. A printer is useful but it could be argued that even this isn't absolutely necessary - you can always take your files to any of the high street print and copy companies who'd be more than happy to do it for you. In fact if you're looking for nice big prints it's probably a more economical option than getting your own large format printer anyway.

But then as a digital scrapbooking business you might frequently send out your work as files only.

A scanner can be useful, and they're remarkably low cost these days. Make sure you buy good quality though. You'll often want to scan something quite small and then enlarge it so you need a high resolution original or it will look all pixelated and broken when it's blown up.

It's a useful tool to have, but not vital. There are plenty of online picture galleries where you can probably find something suitable for your scrapbook layouts.

A blog or website could be considered a vital digital scrapbooking tool - and it is undeniably important that you have one but that's another subject really. It's not a "tool" in this context.

About the only thing you can't do without is some digital scrapbooking software. You may already have a photo editing program but if you don't it is a necessity. What's more they do much more than just edit photos. Adobe Photoshop is the graphics industry standard and you won't find a pro studio anywhere without a copy. It's abilities are quite astonishing.

However, it is rather expensive. For well under a hundred dollars you can get it's baby brother, Adobe Photoshop Elements, and this has become the program of choice for digital scrapbookers. A lot of people do use Corel Paint Shop Pro, but I think Elements has become number one. Certainly there are a huge number of free tutorials available for it.

The only thing Photoshop Elements can't do is put together your digital scrapbook pages. It handles one page at a time. It's a simple job to import these into OpenOffice (a free program a bit like MS Office, but free) and from there create a multi-page PDF which you can either send over the internet or get printed up.

And that's about it. Even starting completely from scratch you've got a fully tooled digital scrapbooking business for a couple of hundred dollars - less if you leave the scanner until later!

If you're investigating ways to start your own digital scrapbooking business you'll find lots more free professional information and a wealth of scrapbook resources at Digital Scrapbooking Businesswhere you can also download a valuable free report from well known scrapbooking teacher Dawn Stegall. If you're thinking about making money from scrapbooking you don't want to ignore help like this!