If you are a scrapbooker, you have countless photos waiting for your creative touch, but it can be very overwhelming – and frustrating too! Messy background content, random people and objects that distract from your main subject, or even a blurred hand or other movement that makes you feel that the photo is ‘un-scrap-able’. But there is a very simple fix – crop your photos!
For some reason it took me a long time to figure this out. It started years ago when I only did traditional paper-scrapping. I was becoming frustrated with scrapping photos that had erroneous annoying ‘things’ in the background, but my intended subject – usually one of my children- looked especially sweet. I finally got the idea to chop up the photo and gather a few more, and create a layout with multiple photos that were all focused on my subject with no distracting ‘noise’ in the background. It felt like a ‘crafting epiphany’.
This is even more easily done with digital scrapbooking. With the simplest software, many available free online (see related links), you can crop your photo and re-save the image on it’s own, ready to be scrapped. When using a high-pixel (300dpi) scanned photo or an image straight from your digital hardware (camera, memory card, etc), the cropped image does not lose quality and the result can be amazing. If you are a paper-scrapper and do not want to lose the original photo, take the time to print off or order extra copies and your original will be safe.
In the images I am sharing with you, I cropped closely to my son’s face and feet and enlarged where needed (background, larger photo). I was thrilled with pages and it looks as though I took the photos on purpose like that – but I did not. I simply cropped away background mess and placed multiple photos on each page. For the larger photos in these layouts, I reduced the transparency (called opacity in some programs) to give the page a blended finish that tied in with the main subject – my youngest son Matthew.
Do not discount those ‘messy’ photos. If you love a part within the scene, try cropping the photo closely and let your creative self do the rest!