Introduction to Digital Scrapbooking

Make the most of your scrapbooking talents to show off your photos and memorabilia with digital scrapbooking. This course provides hands-on experience building scrapbook pages, using artistic journaling, and producing your own artwork with Photoshop Elements.

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6 Weeks / 24 Course Hrs
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New York City College of Technology

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Introduction to Digital Scrapbooking

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Course code: dsc

Learn to use digital editing techniques to show off your photos and memorabilia in Introduction to Digital Scrapbooking! Using Photoshop Elements, this course will teach you how to make the most of your scrapbooking talents and artistic ideas when you combine traditional and digital scrapbooking.

Starting with simple projects, you'll quickly learn how to build pages, use artistic journaling, and produce sophisticated illusions. Photoshop Elements lets you build your own clip art, create frames, and develop multi-layer pages with an endless array of layouts and designs. You'll see how to draw and create your own art, build collages and scrapbooks to share, and work with both color and black and white. If you need to restore or age images—the tools are all available to you. Come take your scrapbooking to a new level!

What you will learn

  • Get acquainted with options for combining traditional and digital scrapbooking
  • Learn to build sophisticated pages with multiple artistic elements
  • Examine the options for panoramic layouts, full-page layouts, and recurring themes
  • Explore the options for black-and-white scrapbooking
  • Learn how to use Photoshop Elements to create special effects for scrapbooks
  • Learn to restore images or create nostalgic formats for scrapbooking
  • Explore the automated features of Photoshop Elements that let you create quick pages and books

How you will benefit

  • Gain confidence in your ability to use Photoshop Elements to create digital scrapbooks for your memories
  • Begin a new hobby in digital scrapbooking
  • Impress friends and family by creating memorabilia artwork in the form of scrapbooks

How the course is taught

  • Instructor-Moderated or Self-Guided online course
  • 6 Weeks or 3 Months access
  • 24 course hours

Digital editing gives scrapbooking a new level of creativity! In the first lesson, you'll have an opportunity to become familiar with the online classroom, Photoshop Elements 11 (the digital editing software you'll be using in this course), and a number of ways to integrate digital options with traditional scrapbooking. You'll see how to keep your personal style intact while taking advantage of fun and easy techniques to enhance your scrapbooks.

In this lesson, you'll have an opportunity to experiment with and explore the many options for enhancing text. You'll see how to add color, shape, and styles, along with more advanced techniques like warping text to fit on objects, making circles with words, and transforming images into text. Journaling is an important part of the storytelling process, so it's time to put the words to work!

Whether you're working with scissors and glue or digital images, one of the ways to embellish scrapbook pages is to layer artistic elements. In this, you'll explore Adobe's layers so you can master the ability to build pages with many different pieces to create the look that tells your story best! The lesson will discuss sizing, background images, frames, and piecing together pages with multiple images, text, and clip art.

Now that you're comfortable with backgrounds, cropping, text, and layers, it's time to add some pizzazz to your pages! In this lesson, you'll see how to create and use clip art to add personal touches and dimension to your scrapbook. You may be surprised at how many important details you have in your pictures, and with Photoshop Elements, you'll be able to pick those out and use them just where you want them. Creating clip art is fun and easy with the tools in Elements. You'll be a pro by the time you finish this lesson!

Continuity and strong story lines captivate readers—even in scrapbooks! This lesson focuses on defining themes, using repetitive elements, and sizing enlargements for excellent quality. You'll see how to build two-page layouts, create panoramic images, and use two different techniques for adding frames to your pages.

Bold and beautiful, black-and-white photography leads to a lesson on how to take a classic look and make it modern, timeless, or even old-fashioned. You'll see how to turn color photos into stunning black-and-white images, or how to keep just a portion in color. You'll also explore using gradients to create black-and-white backgrounds to set off color images.

In this lesson, you'll work a little magic as you learn to create special effects to enhance your backgrounds and pages. You'll even be able to create some of these from nothing! The illusion of texture and dimension is important when building a sophisticated scrapbook, and you'll look at ways to build pages that might just make you wonder if they're real. With the Effects panel, the Filter menu, and some new tricks with layers and layer styles, you'll be amazed at what you can do.

Much like finger painting lets you release your artistic side, Photoshop Elements brushes are full of possibilities for detailed strokes, colors, and patterns—some even paint pictures! You'll see how to use the standard brushes, create and customize your own, and build pages and backgrounds with a variety of styles and patterns.

In this lesson, you'll see how to turn back the hands of time to create pages using restored images and nostalgic pages. You'll also learn how to age a modern photo to match the look of older ones. With the pattern tools in Photoshop Elements, you'll create fabric-like backgrounds and even see how to add a bit of stitching. Digital editing merges the old and the new in surprising ways!

Digital scrapbooking gives you lots of options for creating three-dimensional looks, and in this lesson, you'll see how to use new shortcuts to make this quick and easy. With Photoshop Elements Guided Edit and special filters, you'll be able to create reflections, spheres, and many more effects.

It's time to draw! You'll be surprised by how creative you can be with Photoshop Elements drawing tools, even if you don't think of yourself as artistic. With the Pencil tool, the Undo option, and the Eraser tool, changes and corrections are easy. You can even remove something and put it back. You'll see how to add line graphics with Wingdings and turn color images into coloring pages, as well as some other drawing techniques you can use to build backgrounds and art for your scrapbook pages.

In the last lesson, you'll explore a couple of automatic options in Photoshop Elements to help you finish your scrapbooks quickly. You'll see how to build an automatic collage page from your images and how to upload them to book formats you can print at home or send out to have professionally printed. You'll finish this course with lots of great ideas to finish your scrapbooks and share them with your family and friends!

Beverly Richards Schulz

Beverly Richards Schulz is an award-winning photographer and graduate of the New York Institute of Photography. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Legal Studies from UC Berkeley and a master's degree in Adult and Continuing Education. For the past 10 years, Schulz has taught at the University of San Francisco. With more than 15 years teaching experience, she has written over 30 digital photography and digital editing courses. She co-authored the book "Photoshop Elements 14—What's New?"

Eric Johnson

Eric Johnson is an experienced digital photographer and editor. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics Education (emphases on Computer Science) from Oregon State University and a Master's in Business Administration from Seattle University. Eric has worked for major software and computer corporations, freelance photography and editing services, and has been working with Beverly Schulz teaching ed2go photography courses since 2004. He is her co-author on "Photoshop Elements 14 - What's New?"

Instructor Interaction: The instructor looks forward to interacting with learners in the online moderated discussion area to share their expertise and answer any questions you may have on the course content.

Prerequisites:

You should feel comfortable acquiring digital images, either with a digital camera, using images scanned onto CDs, or scanning film prints. Basic computer skills, such as using a mouse, creating and accessing folders, and downloading and saving files will be briefly reviewed in this course, but should be familiar to you.

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

  • This course can be taken on either a PC or Mac.
  • This course is written using the Windows version of the software. If you have Mac, you will need to make standard Windows/Mac keystroke conversions which are included in the course material.

Software Requirements:

  • PC: Windows 8 or later.
  • Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
  • Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
  • Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 or higher (not included in enrollment). Instructions, screenshots, and examples are based on versions 11, 12, and 13, but later versions, including year-numbered versions like Photoshop Elements 2025, work well with only minor changes for the course.
  • Adobe Acrobat Reader.
  • Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

  • Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Instructional Material Requirements:

The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.

Instructor-Moderated: A new session of each course begins each month. Please refer to the session start dates for scheduling.​

Self-Guided: Your course begins immediately after you enroll.​

Instructor-Moderated: Once a course session starts, two lessons will be released each week for the 6 week duration of your course. You will have access to all previously released lessons until the course ends. You will interact with the instructor through the online discussion area. There are no live sessions or online meetings with the instructor.

Self-Guided: You have 3 months of access to the course. After enrolling, you can learn and complete the course at your own pace, within the allotted access period. You will have the opportunity to interact with other students in the online discussion area.

Instructor-Moderated: The interactive discussion area for each lesson automatically closes two weeks after each lesson is released, so you're encouraged to complete each lesson within two weeks of its release. However, you will have access to all lessons from the time they are released until the course ends.​

Self-Guided: There is no time limit to complete each lesson, other than completing all lessons within the allotted access period. Discussion areas for each lesson are open for the entire duration of the course.

Instructor-Moderated: Students enrolled in a six-week online class benefit from a one-time, 10-day extension for each course. No further extensions can be provided beyond these 10 days.​

Self-Guided: Because this course is self-guided, no extensions will be granted after the start of your enrollment.

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