Printing from home...how do you do it?

[SSCHRH76]

I am new to this digital thing and all I have managed to do so far is buy a binder and the page protectors for my album. I currently have pictures ordered from our most recent family vacation which will be my starting point for my digital (hybrid) scrapbook. I so badly want to print things from home...print pictures, journaling boxes, etc. but am "confused" (for lack of a better word) on how people handle that process. It seems silly to print one little journaling block or 1 picture on a piece of paper, so my question is: how does everyone print multiple items? I am again having a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of creating JPEGs, etc....so my assumption is that people create multiple JPEGs and then place those in a Word doc or something like that to print on a 8.5x11 piece of paper or photo paper?? Or how do you do it?

Thank you in advance for any help and ideas

[home in ottawa]

Hi there and welcome to DD. While many items can be printed in Word for hybrid (as in paper and digital combos) most of us create LO's in Photoshop Elements or the full version of Photoshop. Lots of wonderful tips to be had under the "getting started" tab at the top of the page and many tutorials in the store. Some of us get our pages printed by any one of several different companies, some get bound books printed. If you want to print at home you need a large format printer to do 12x12" LO's, so many reduce and print 8x8 and still others do 8.5x11" pages. So not one single answer to your question.

You can download a trial version of Photoshop Elements at the Adobe website. Hope that this was of some use to you. Hope to see some pages in the gallery.

[HeatherPrins]

Hi there and welcome to DD! I don't do any hybrid stuff but I am sure some ladies that do will pop in here to help you out.

[maureenreynolds]

I don't do much in hybrid, but when I do and print at home, trust me, I use every bit of space I can on either the photo paper or the cardstock. When I did my recent December Daily hybrid, I started with an 8.5x11" document in PSE and placed my journal and other digi items on that page until it was filled. Once printed I cut them all out. My photos I sent out to be printed at Walmart or Costco. That is definitely cheaper.

Lots of "how to's" for doing this in either PSE or Word are shown in photos and some videos on DD designer Ali Edwards' blog and Cathy Zielske's blog. If you want to be efficient you pretty much need to use one of those programs or another word processing program or photo editing program. hth!

Most of what you will see here is a full digital layout.

[Lisa Pate]

I use adobe elements to print my at home projects onto cardstock. I create an 8 1/2 by 11 and fill it with the different items I want to print to get the most use out of one page. The ladies have noted some wonderful resources above about where to look at on how to get started including the free 30 day trial of elements!

[esther_a]

If you scan through the Hybrid Gallery you'll see lots of ideas for combining printed digital pages with traditional supplies. Paula is a fabulous hybrid scrapper. It's hard to tell her paper LOs from her digital ones! She posts some of her hybrid pages here but many are on her blog (live.scrap.repeat). Paula's favorite thing to do is to print a photo and journaling block (like Cathy Zielsky's) or cluster of photos (like Katie's) and place that on cardstock or paper. Like those who posted above, I used to squish as many photos and journaling blocks as I could onto my document before printing and then cut them out for my page. For totally digital 12x12 pages I persisted for a while printing them in halves and gluing them together. That really wasn't terribly satisfactory! Now that I'm 100% digital I just print all my layouts as photobooks.

[MINIDEB]

My suggestions would be all of the above and the following.

I think you will find you love the digital format and that you can combine it with your paper scrapbooking to enjoy both worlds. You can do it as simple as adding the title later or a piece of cardstock behind it to make it a 12 x 12 layout or add tons of stuff!

I would suggest you try 1- 1 page layout in either an 8 1/2 x 11 format or an 8 x 8 format at home... it will be a little more expensive than sending them out that first time but you will have a better idea of what you have and you will have your reward so to speak faster... if you don't have a printer at home ... print at your local walmart etc in the neighborhood at home... I use a camera shop and get better quality..... it's always cheaper at the print places but sometimes waiting isn't always easy....

buy a template ... The designers have done all the work.... until you get the hang of things you can just add a picture and your done...there are tons to choose from and the new ones come out every weekend on sale - and the old ones are on sale on Thursdays (not all - but usually a good many) they are really easy to use and you can see the stuff thats mentioned in the tutorials there's usually a layout idea in the bottom corner so you can see it with the pictures in place .... and you can see them used in the gallery.

scrap something not so important to you first until you get the hang of things. I scrapbook and hybrid scrapbook in Photo shop elements it's not as expensive as the full photoshop and you can get free trials above..

When you digital scrapbook things aren't true 4 x 6 - 3 x 5 5 x 7 like your used to seeing in paper scrapbooking .... it's all confusing at first ... but surprisingly pretty soon the lightbulbs will flash in your head and you'll get it.

last but not least have fun ! remember if you screw it up its just a piece of paper... throw it away and try again... don't sweat the little stuff. Most of us had a little trial an error at first... The tutorials here are excellant - they have step by step instructions with pictures and words that are very clear.

In photoshop elements there is a simple print button that allows you to print and size it to your paper size....there's a print preview so you don't have to print it til your ready so if you start as a 12 x 12 it can print an 8 x 8 on a letter size sheet of photo paper

[PaulaSG]

There are lots of good tips listed above. I do a lot of hybrid scrapbooking as Esther mentioned (thanks so much Esther! ) I print a lot of my photos using Katie's photo clusters for example and often print multiple clusters and elements on one 8.5x11 sheet. Hybrid scrapbooking takes a bit more planning than traditional paper scrapbooking because you could waste a lot of paper if you don't plan ahead.

I print a lot of my photos and elements on 4x6 sheets -- there's a lot less waste that way. I mostly print my journaling on cardstock also. You can print on smaller pieces of paper by adhering scraps onto a full sized sheet of paper using re-positionable adhesive.

I hope this helps!

[MINIDEB]

I thought of another tip... the earlier tips were at about 5am in my time zone.....there's a lot of freebies from Katie and the other designers in the freebie section ... it will give you some stuff to play with.