Perfect Timing!

As you can see from my previous post I have converted to ACDSee’s Photo Editor. Even though I’ve been using Photoshop 7 for years, I’ve only been digiscrapping for one year and I’m still a beginner when it comes to learning the tools and techniques of digital scrapbooking in Photoshop. And I doubt I will ever have the kind of income that would allow me to upgrade to a newer version! But here I am, one week into the Photo Editor learning curve making pages with blended photos, extractions, and almost everything else I’m accustomed to doing on my pages. I love the image basket and the way I can drag multiple copies of something from the basket to my workspace. I love how easy it is to put all the letters needed for a title from an alpha set into the basket, drag them to the workspace, line them up how I want them, make a group, then recolor the whole thing all at once. I usually didn’t even mess with alpha sets in Photoshop. It would take hours to make a stamped-looking title and getting it all colored just right. I usually just resorted to using a font at 150 point or so. But I’m using my ACDSee Photo Manager to browse through all my long-neglected alpha sets with new enthusiasm! And on top of all of this fun, there’s now a contest! So expect to see more pages accomplished…each one earns me another entry in a drawing for a Photo Manager upgrade, my full Photo Editor registration code, or possibly both programs plus a Kodak 3-in-1 Printer! Boy that would be really sweet sitting here next to my Kodak Easyshare Camera! Everyone wish me luck…and if you’ve never tried doing your scrapping on the computer because Photoshop is just too intimidating, give Photo Editor a try…and check out the tutorials at Digiscrapinfo.

New layouts made in ACDSee Photo Editor

I just wanted to share what I’ve been up to. I was so scared of upgrading to Vista because I knew I’d lose my Photoshop 7 and Microsoft Office and I can’t afford the upgrades. So I’m happily using Open Office and ACDSee Photo Editor. As you can see…it does what I need it to do and you can’t beat the price!

credits are here and here. Thanks for looking.

An Open Letter to Digital Scrapbooking Kit Designers:

Help me to do the right thing. Please!

I’m a professional digital scrap-booker and I march with you as a fellow digital art creator in the fight against piracy. Among all of your customers I am probably the most likely to actually read your terms of use. And if I don’t understand anything in your TOU file I am more likely to contact you for clarification. I want to respect your time and effort in creating your artwork as well as the time and energy that went into creating your terms and keeping your products updated with current TOU documents. But I have almost 400 of these documents to read through and comply with and the vast majority of them are vague or don’t even mention professional uses of their products. Some of the terms I’m asked to comply with may seem quite reasonable to you but in the reality of a typical scrap-booker’s workflow they comprise an accounting nightmare.

An example of this is the request that I not use a kit for more than one album without contacting the designer, or repurchasing the kit, or paying some kind of fee…etc. Now…is that if I use one element once on one page of a client’s album? That kit is now off limits until the condition is satisfied? Is it once per file within the kit and I must track every file used for every layout for every client and if I want to reuse a paper, or a staple…then I’m responsible to follow through with the TOU’s instructions? How about using said kit for one client/project? Any file in said kit or at least some percentage of files in the kit? Can you see how much easier my life would be to just forget the entire idea and find other supplies with fewer provisions to satisfy? I want to do the right thing but I’m also in business and want to earn money.

Among my almost 400 TOU files are at least 350 different sets of terms. There are dozens of words and/or phrases with several possible meanings or unclear definitions to decipher. And almost all of them state that the designer can change those terms at any time and it’s my responsibility to confirm the veracity of each document before I use the product. The vast majority of these documents are unsecured txt files rather than pdf’s which protect you from changes made by dishonest customers and protect me from being accused of being a dishonest customer. And for some reason I cannot comprehend, the mere mention of any effort to standardize TOU’s raises hackles and ticks designers off. Even asking you to standardize the definitions of the terminology used in your documents seems to be taboo. Wouldn’t it be infinitely easier for your customers to comply with your TOU if they understood them clearly and didn’t have to guess what you meant? I would think that positive result would be well worth whatever sense of individuality you may feel you are giving up by joining with your fellow designers in deciding on some standard TOU sets or styles.

At this point I have concluded that my business interests would only be served by buying from designers who allow unrestricted professional use without extra licenses or fees. If I knew just a little more about designing I wouldn’t buy at all, just design custom papers and elements for my client’s albums. Is the loss of my business enough to make a difference? Probably not. There are a lot of other professional scrappers though who feel this way too…and this segment of the industry is growing fast. Is our business, as a group, a significant portion of your sales? I don’t know. Ultimately it is up to you to allow scrap-for-hire usage, to charge fees, or to completely forbid it. And that’s fine…I’m not trying to twist anyone’s arm. I would just like your terms, whatever form they may take, to be clearly defined and laid out in a pdf document. I would like you to respect my time and effort as a professional digital artist by keeping things easy to understand. And I would like you to think about issues of workflow and what constitutes reasonable effort on your customer’s part to comply with your terms when composing them. That’s all. Help me do the right thing…just tell me what the right thing is…please!

A Most Relunctant Convert

So now that I’ve been digi scrapping for a whole year, and buying supplies for a year, I have a real mess going! Actually, I don’t…I’m pretty anal about being organized…on the computer anyway. But it still takes forever to dig around all those folder looking for just the right papers or elements. I tried the ACDSee trial once before and didn’t like it. The learning curve just seemed too steep to tackle, the task too overwhelming! I played around with a variety of other programs but nothing quite seemed to fit the bill. Then I won a copy of ACDSee Photo Manager at a chat and I determined to jump in and learn how to make the most of the opportunity. So I’ve been sorting, tagging, and keywording my supplies working my way through the tutorials at http://www.digiscrapinfo.com and lo and behold…I like it! I’m actually having fun!

So I took a screenshot to show you how it’s going:

The file tree on the left shows you how I’ve sorted my layouts/projects in an art folder and my supplies are divided up by designer name…a folder per designer and then a sub-folder per kit is nested inside. On the right are my categories for tagging. I have colors in ROY G BIV order, how kits can be used since I’m going pro, and then supply types. These categories are actually pretty general. My goal is to be able to glance though just about anything in three clicks or less. So I’m into speed tagging rather than detail tagging.

For example, I used the instructions in this tutorial to select all the kits by a designer so I could assign the designer’s name in the author field and tag everything with the designer’s terms of use all in the same step. You can also use the same procedure to select your entire stash then in the databse pane sort by image type to pop all the jpegs to the top. It’s easy to select all of them at once to tag as paper. After that I did a quick search for files named folder.jpg (I named all the previews that beforehand) and unchecked papers and checked previews instead using the properties tab. I searched for and deleted the piracy jpegs next (don’t worry, I’m totally on board! No need to preach to the choir here!) and untagged other non-paper jpegs like tou images and coupons.

I am now in the process of going through each kit folder and assigning type tags to the pngs. By keeping the categories simple I can quickly select all the fasteners at once, then the fibers (includes bows, ribbons, stitching, etc.) and work my way through my very short list of element types. I call this speed tagging for the easily overwhelmed…or ACDSee on training wheels. Later on I can subdivide my fasteners if I feel the need to but for now this works. So here’s the rundown on my categories and what I include in them…this is just what works for me though…the beauty of this program is how flexible it is. You can set your lists up in whatever way works for you.

• Ephemera (anything that’s three dimensional…like flowers, gems, or bottlecaps)
• Fasteners (things that stick other things to a page…pins, brads, eyelets…even tape)
• Fibers (textiles of all kinds: ribbons, yarn, bows, stitching, fabrics)
• Papers (300ppi jpeg files of any kind)
• Previews
• Stamps and Stickers (translucent or opaque elements that are generally two dimensional)
• Tags, Frames, and Mats (any kind of tag, if it’s used as a frame, or if it’s used to mat a photo it gets this tag)
• Templates (layered files or craft shapes like envelopes)
• Wordart (if it has words on it then it gets this tag)

Lots of items overlap…like a stamp-like frame with a word on it would get stamp, tag, and wordart tags in addition to color and terms of use tags.

So that’s my system so far. If you’re wondering about alphas…that’s another whole procedure and I’m starting in on it using another tutorial from http://www.digiscrapinfo.com.

I might have gone kicking and screaming into the ACDSee camp but I’m a flagbearer now! In fact I’m even in love with ACDSee’s new Photo Editor but that’s a topic for another post.