Digital project life is a way to scrapbook your precious memories on the go! A few days ago I posted about the innovative and dynamic new scrapbooking craze that has taken over the scrapbooking world in the past 18 months - Project Life.
While I do still love playing with real paper and embellishments, the collection of supplies, gadgets and completed creations was taking up a lot of space... with the space needed continually growing to fit everything in. So after so many years of saying I would never go 'digital' with my scrapbooking, I gave it a go.
More specifically, I had an attempt at digital project life, which you will see above. I had seen so many examples of digital pages by others and loved the clean, crisp look of these pages and all of the Becky Higgins Project Life line was available digitally.
Almost instantly I was hooked and I ended up doing a complete year of my daughter's first year in both digital and a physical project life album. The digital pages I put together in a photo book for both grandmother's for Christmas & they loved it!!
Since then, I have decided to switch to digital for my 2014 yearly album, as well as going back and doing a few holidays/previous years digitally. It is so quick and easy, and all you need is a digital kit, a photo editing program such as Photoshop, Lightroom or one of the free ones available, and your photos. That's it! And there are so many free tutorials out there to teach you the basics.
The best part about digital project life otherwise is the space saving. You can keep the pages all on your PC, displaying them perhaps on a website, facebook or a blog, or you could have them printed individually and slotted into a scrapbook album in between traditional pages, or have a photo book printed with each of the layouts in order.
Check out some of my completed pages.
Project Life has transformed the way I record my memories and introduced me to a new appreciation of creative simplicity that I am so grateful for. I love that it is a system that can be adapted to suit the Individual, and as such, we all adapt our own process.
My Digital Project Life Process
The Project Life app seems to have been many people's introduction to digital project life, as these days I get so many questions on my Instagram photos on how I did a certain thing on my page using the app. In actual fact, I rarely use the app. My project life creations are mostly done via PC. So I thought it might be useful to share with others what my project life process looks like.
I am a digi project lifer mostly these days, which came about almost by accident when I decided to try for fun. Who knew that would one day lead me to my dream creative team, as part of the Becky Higgins 2015 team. That's bucket list stuff right there!
To create my pages I use a windows PC and Adobe Premiere Elements 11. There are a few new versions these days, or you can subscribe direct to the Adobe Creative Cloud for all the most up to date software, but PSE11 does the job well.
I store my photos on my PC in yearly folders, further separated into monthly folders. I also store my digital project life supplies in folders on my PC (backing up both often on an external hard drive).
My process goes like this:
1. Open PSE11, my current photo folder & Project Life folder.
2. I work weekly, Monday to Sunday, so I highlight, drop & drag all the photos from that date range into PSE.
3. I go through and cull the photos that won't make the cut for the weekly layout by simply closing them in PSE so I'm only left with the good ones (and still often more than what will go into the layout).
4. Based on the photos for the week, I choose suitable digital PL templates and open them in PSE.
5. I edit my photos as I go, adding them to the template along the way until I am happy with my photo placements.
6. I open the folder of the PL kit I want to use and highlight, copy and drag the journal & filler cards I think will work then have a play around til I am happy with the colours, placement and overall look.
7. I add in my journalling and any extra digital elements to the page.
8. I choose a pattern paper for the background and simply drag my layout template on top, drag in the corners to create a border and save the file as whatever week layout it is. I also save a copy of the PSD file in case I need to make changes later.
That's pretty much it. Nothing complicated. It has worked well for me for the past 2 years, although of course I am always eager to learn more and experiment.
I would love to hear about your project life process so please share in the comments.
Keep an eye out soon and I will do a comparison between Digi & Traditional style project life scrapbooking in case you aren't sure what will suit you.
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