Picture Pages*

I spent the better part of Saturday starting on the pictoral portion of our adoption profile. Since I haven't had a lot of luck with unearthing recent photos of me, I decided to do a page about our wedding. I was already pretty sure that this was a page I was going to put in there since I have really good snapshots of both Tim's and my enormous extended families and I thought it would be good to show the simply massive quantities of people who are eagerly awaiting a chance to spoil a baby. (There are probably one or two people who, realistically, I should X through since it's doubtful that they're interested in babies, but I figured the general idea was really what I was going for and exacting full disclosure wasn't necessary.) So, with our trusty scanner at the ready, I zipped in four photos saved them and opened up my trusty Paint Shop Pro (essentially the same thing as Photoshop, just not by Adobe. There may be other differences, but I don't know what they are. Nor, really, do I care. This'll get the job done. Plus it was super cheap. (Read: free) because I got it from someone after they uninstalled it and decided to switch to a more current version of something else. Cheap, legal and free works for me.)

Anyway. When I first realized that there would be no avoiding the creation of some sort of scrapbook-type-things for our adoption profile, I began researching digital scrapbooking. Because at least then I could be at my computer. And use considerably less glue. Also? No funky-edged scissors that mostly do a bang-up job of ripping or mushing your paper but not-so-bang-up a job of actually cutting the paper and leaving behind cool and funky edges. It amazes me the vast quantity of information available out there for people who "digiscrap" - yes, they've coined their own word for digital scrapbooking and yes, it sounds a lot like a Pokemon. Basically there is at least a one-to-one correlation between the stuff you can purchase for actual paper scrapbooking and digital scrapbooking. So you're still stuck wading through the morass of different papers, die cuts, letters, borders, ribbons ...you name it, they've digitized it.

So if you were hoping to avoid some of the confusing complexity inherent in scrapbooking by going digital, don't get your hopes up. Also, if you were hoping to save money by going digital and you're not necessarily creative enough to create your own digital papers, die cuts, fonts, borders and ribbons...that thing about your hopes? Yeah, just say that a second time. However, there are some wonderful souls out there who, in the idiom of drug dealers everywhere (or at least the charicature of drug dealers everywhere) will let you have free samples. Free samples of digital papers and borders and these interesting combinations of coordinating digital widgets, free for your own personal use.

I spent a couple of strangely enjoyable hours looking through free digital kits, downloading this one or that one, and playing with image sizes and placement and all that kind of stuff. But it was more fun cause, hey! I was on my computer. That makes it more interesting just by default. Finally I had a page with four photos all whacked together in a very simple and yet, I think, representative of us design.

And then I printed it out just to see how it might look.

It looked like a COPS family reunion. All our faces were little pixelated blurs. Even the cute little captions I'd put by all the photos were pixelated. It was horrible.

So, with wailing and gnashing of teeth, and perhaps a little swearing at our newish printer that, as far as I could tell, has cruddy resolution, I looked at what I was dealing with and came to the realization that I hadn't changed the default resolution of 72dpi on the new image in PSP to something that would be considered "good resolution" like, oh I don't know, the 600 dpi our printer does? Yeah, photos really don't look good at 72 dpi. Just in case you were tempted to ever try that out. (Of course, if you want to publish wanted posters with pixelated faces to protect the guilty - 72 dpi rocks.)

*If you now have the Picture Pages song stuck in your head like I have since Saturday - you're welcome.