Digital Scrapbooking and General software links

I've been asked many times whether there was a free program that could be used in making digital scrapbooking pages, I discovered this one called Paint and it has many features that will make getting started in digital scrapping a breeze.
From the Paint site "About
Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.
It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as www.adobe.com Adobe® Photoshop®, www.corel.com Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The www.gimp.org GIMP.
The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with a small amount of C++ for installation and shell-integration related functionality. The source code is available under the terms of the MIT License."

Visual tutorial Link for using free Paint software to make a completed page with blushbutter.com's quickpages.

I just have to share some wonderful sites with you for enhancing your scrapbooks in photoshop. There are many more free plugins and proffessional plugins also, not shown here. The first is a favourite site of mine to visit for regular photoshop actions, I really love her paper tear actions, love the torn and inking edge action alot on my layouts for the paper edges http://www.atomiccupcake.com/ . Actions can literally save you oodles of time in the process work of making the same effects over and over again. Saving the wrist particularily for designers and fulltime scrappers on a mission to get albums done.

The following is a site that have some really wonderful actions from vintage photo framing to book making as pictured here. They are really clever and a whole lot of fun! http://www.panosfx.com/ Check out there free section for personal use which making scrapbooking layouts falls under.

Monica Larsen has some great ribbon and bow actions that are wonderful to use, twisted and rumpled ribbons. Lot's of really time saving actions that are just perfect to go with whatever kit you have purchased.
http://www.monica-larsen.net/store/

Other sites you may want to investigate are http://www.alienskin.com/ for there fabulous plugins you'll have to watch the demos to see what I mean!

For a nifty page curling plugin check out Av Bro page curler here :
http://www.avbros.com/english/products.html

For a great free tiler filter and many more free filters check out Richard Rosenman here:
http://www.richardrosenman.com

Oh and I can't forget Auto Fx's Dreamsuite for the wonderful liquid metal plugin and the other cool plugins they have for terrific photo edges and effects.
http://www.autofx.com/dreamsuite/ds1_Gallery.html

Photoshop Mama has some awesome tutorials for free with her newsletter and in some of her archives. She teachers you how to make your own simple time saving actions in a simple easy to follow video. She always talks to you as if you are a beginner so her tutorials are suitable for the advanced to beginner levels, I highly reccommend them to become familiar with your powerful programs capabilites. http://www.photoshopmama.net/

I know with all these great links to investigate you'll be busy visiting sites in search of making your pages the best they can be. Oh on a caution note of advice, actions and plugins can take alot of ram and if your computer is only just managing to get things saved in high resolution in Adobe photoshop, please don't go installing any plugins until you get more ram and a faster computer. I work off a 4gig ram computer and a 1000gig memory PC system so I don't have to worry about my computer crashing, which it will do on the slow systems.

If you found this article helpful, please leave me a comment

Hi just my two cents here for those of you with no experience at all and want to put a free site up professionally and fast, retaining all control then I suggest taking a look at www.doteasy.com they have free 100mb with no banner adds like bravehost do. Also if you want to have scripts running on the site they have tech's install them for you. Personally I suggest getting a domain and site through them and having blogger installed as the main script, with some tweaking it can look proffessional and stay interesting with the site changing constantly. I'm not sure if ranking on the major search engines is important to you or not, but if you don't use a blog for your main page it's virtually a waste of money trying to pay to get onto the search engines. I guess it all depends if you want returning hits too, as looking at a nice stagnant page the first time is lovely but everytime you revisit and it still is the same then forget it!. Run a search on scrapbooking on a major search engine and see how many sites come up, last time I checked there were 20,500,000 and I ranked finally on page 13 woohoo! I can tell you not with out some effort on my behalf. Now if you were to do a image scrapbooking search then I'm on page 3 thereabouts depends on the content on my site for that search day. Here I am giving all my secrets away, but take my experience from me, don't learn the hard way on building a website business up!
Now why do I say blogger instead of b2evolution? Because unless you have php scripting knowledge and a database then forget B2evo, blogger keep and run updates and security patches(necessary defence against hackers) on their script constantly and you have no concerns about doing that for yourself. Easy admin controls and photo upload areas. If you want more you can link static html pages to your blog roll website showcasing a gallery and store. Well I'm hoping this news article saves some time and alot of frustration for some of you. Please Comment away, more advice and knowledge freely contributed would be lovely for visitors reading this.

I came across this article and thought it really needed to be shared amongst the digital scrapping communties and websites, especially if your designing your own website and considering selling your items online. I have personally found getting into the search engines rankings one of the hardest things to do! But for an online business it's a must!
By Bill Treloar - Entrepreneur.com writes: People searching for your products or services on the Internet can be an important source of new customers for you. Because someone searching for what you sell is already "sold"?they're looking to buy. Where else can you find that kind of qualified sales lead?

=> Read more!

A free software download from Google.
Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organised by date with folder names you will recognise. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organised.

Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips. And Picasa makes it a snap to share your pictures – you can email, print photos home, make gift CDs, and even post pictures on your own blog