Digital Scrapbooking Embellishments

One advantage of a vector image is that it can be rescaled to any size without any loss in quality. This is a great attribute for making your own digital scrapbooking embellishments.

You can scan 3D objects like buttons, screws, tacks, ribbons and rick-rack but what you then have are resolution-dependent raster images. To use them over and over again as embellishments, you want to convert them to vector images.

In the example above, I used this very cute package of beauty salon-related buttons left over from my paper scrapping days.

If you’re a paper scrapper, you know how these things accumulate. You may use a few and be left with odds and ends; or you may purchase something that just caught your eye and you figured you’d find a use for it “sometime”.

No such problem when you digi-scrap. Your embellishments never run out; nor do you ever have any left over. You always have just enough. They don’t take up space in your craft area and nearby closets, spilling out of boxes and in constant need of organization.

Carefully lay the object on your scanner’s platen. Cover it with a high contrast cloth or paper and scan it into Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or a similar program.

Use a high resolution to capture detail, highlights and shadows. I used 600 psi here because the buttons are pretty simple – almost cartoonish.

To use it as an embellishment, you want a transparent background. Duplicate the Background layer to unlock the pixels and close the eye of the first layer (“Background”).

Working on the Background Copy layer, erase all the extraneous background pixels. Use the Magic Wand tool to select background areas and delete them. You can adjust the Tolerance Level for the Wand on its tool bar.

If there is pretty good contrast between the object and its background, 100 usually works well.

You want to capture as much background as possible without grabbing any part of the object itself. When you can’t grab any more stray pixels with the Magic Wand, zoom in close and go all around the object’s edge using the Eraser tool for clean-up.

Once you have erased the background, play around with layer styles by clicking on the scripty “f” on the bottom of the Layers palette. Whatever you select from the list will be applied to the active layer.

On the embellishments above, I used Bevel and Emboss by playing around with all the options until I got a look I liked. [Drop shadows are applied after you copy an embellishment into a layout.]

File>Save As and select .png as the file type. Type in a name for your embellishment and enter. When the PNG Options box pops us, leave it at the default Interlace None and click OK. To use your new embellishment in a layout, simply open the file and use the Move tool to drag it into your layout.

Move it into position and resize it using Edit>Transform>Scale.

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