If you haven’t heard of Project Life, it’s a simplified version of scrapbooking. You can find out more about it beckyhiggins.com! You should definitely check it out. 🙂
To make scrapbooks using Project Life, you have a few options. You can buy physical pocket pages and slip your photos and Project Life cards into them and place them in albums. You can purchase the app and make digital pages on your phone or tablet and print them in phonebooks, or as individual pages that slip into albums. Or, you can make pages on your desktop or laptop using Photoshop and the templates and cards available from their website, and print them as photobooks or albums. And, I have made up my own fourth option. 😉
I am a wedding photographer by trade and a few years ago I learned how to use InDesign so I could design client albums in a more efficient way, in a program that is designed for print layouts. I love the app, but I would get behind because I take so many photos with my digital SLR and they were on my desktop. I would have to transfer them to my phone or iPad to make pages, and I wouldn’t get around to it all of the time! So, I decided to try laying out pages in InDesign. Working with layers in Photoshop for print design can be a bit cumbersome, (unless you have Photoshop Elements and you buy the new photoshop templates at beckyhiggins.com! Wahoo!) but I love InDesign!
Photo Dump
I first download all of my photos off of my phone and memory cards. I try to do this once a week. I import them all into Lightroom, Adobe’s photo organizing and editing software, where I have a catalogue for all of my personal photos. I LOVE Lightroom! I can edit them all in one place and jump from one date to another so easily. I can flag, color code, add keywords and do searches, etc. I pay monthly to get Lightroom and Photoshop, as well as InDesign. I think the photographer package (Lightroom and Photoshop) is $15/month (Canadian $$).
- I back up all of my photos using BackBlaze. I have it set to do this automatically every day.
.png)
Cull
Once a week on Sundays I go through the last week’s photos and select the keepers (I usually take summers off, I’ll be honest! But I try to do it every Sunday night the rest of the year). I flag them with the “P” key on my keyboard as I scroll through. I organize each week in a Collection for that week and export them as JPGS since I shoot RAW files.
.jpg)
.jpg)
PINIMAGE
Design
- I open up my album in InDesign – I have an InDesign file for each year. I set my document up to be 24″ wide by 12″ tall in spreads so that each page is 12″ x 12″. I may not print them that large, but I have the option! I start with a few spreads and keep adding more as I need them.
- Next, I use templates that I have created, based on Project Life templates because I love them and want these to match my app pages, to design the layout. I save each page design in a Library. These are really easy to create! Once I have templates saved in this Library, I can access it via a side panel and simply drag and drop my chosen layout onto the page.
PINIMAGEThis is Design A – the Photoshop versions are a free download and I used them as a model.
- Once I have my layout created, I can drag and drop the photos and cards I want into each of the boxes.
- Adobe has another program called Bridge which some people use to help organize their photos – you can open it up inside InDesign and access the files on your computer or external hard drives. So I open up “Mini Bridge” as it’s called, and then I can just locate and drag photos or cards onto my scrapbook page. When I’m done for the year, or want to print some pages, I simple export the pages as single JPGs.
- I do a spread for each week and title them by the Week #. To add text to the Project Life cards, I simply select the Text tool and draw a text box right where I want it, then choose the font and size I would like.
- I use Design A 90% of the time – it keeps things simple and that’s what I need! I use the Moonlight Edition 90% of the time, too, and I just tweak the colors. Done is better than perfectly not done!
Print/Publish
Once I am ready to print pages or make a book, I simply use File->Export and export the document as JPGs, or image files. You can select to export only certain pages, or choose whether to export them as individual pages, or spreads.
I love using InDesign to do my albums this way! This is a brief rundown – if you have questions or comments I’d love to hear them!
