Feb
07

Crop Preparations Part 2

Posted by DeAnna

This is a 4-part series on preparing for a crop. Make sure you check out Part 1 first. (Note: I am posting this without the video as I am having technical difficulty with uploading a clear quality video. I will try to have it up as soon as possible… I apologize for the delay in posting!)

For years I have been really bad at printing out the photos I’ve taken. Part of it was that once we went digital it was just too easy to take photos. And LOTS of them! And then trying to figure out the software that came with our camera in order to get them printed. And deciding who to use to get them printed, and how to get our photos from our computer to them to be printed. It just went on and on. In the more recent past I have simply been using Photoshop to resize my Photos manually and I have pretty much only printed the photos I want to scrap (and usually only around crop time have I been scrapping).

Lately I have been making sure I print out the best of my photos (or bad ones that speak to me) every few months, and I think I’ll be trying to scrap more 4×6 and 5×7 photos (or larger if certain photos warrant it) to make it easier than trying to manipulate all of my images to certain sizes to fit into a sketch. I find that almost always I can crop a 4×6 into a 2×3, 4×3 or a square to accent a larger picture. That was one of the hindrances I found with my scrapbooking – too many times I took too long deciding on photos, manipulating them, resizing them, etc. and then felt overwhelmed when I got behind in preparing photos for layouts. Then I’d be in a mad rush trying to prepare a whole bunch of kits for a crop and it was so much work. I’ve finally decided on a system that works for me and is simple enough to do and maintain. This way, when I finish the projects I have prepared for the crop, it will be easy to create a new list (remember I like lists ;D), grab the photos I want from the album, grab some papers and embellishments, and I’ll be good to go.

So I’ve created a video showing you the programs I use and the reason I decided to use them. At the moment I use three programs – Adobe Lightroom, Bridge and Photoshop. It sounds like a lot but the three of them each have qualities I like and they play nice together. In the video I show you how I import my photos from my card reader (using Lightroom), review and select the photos I want to print (using Bridge), and then how I edit those photos (using Camera Raw). Once I have edited and saved my photos to .jpg files (since we shoot in raw format with our Nikon), I upload them to our local Photo Express. It’s quick and easy, close by and they give me good quality, archival prints. There are many other online companies that you can use, but I won’t go into them here since that’s not the purpose of this post. For photos that I want to really highlight I will open them in Photoshop and size them to a specific size, or add overlays or brushes to them.

In my next post I’ll show you how I gather the papers and embellishments I plan to use with the photos to have each layout kitted and ready to scrap. For that I will probably have another video (using my video camera as opposed to a computer-based video ;D) for you since I think it will be easiest to physically show you how I do that. See you in a few days ;D

DeAnna

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