Write My Life

I finished the digital scrapbook of our family vacation to San Simeon and Disneyland in November. Here’s the Shutterfly book of the trip:

Click here to view this photo book.

This is the final week of the on-line class. No new information, but lots of encouragement to continue. The assignment from this week is to look at all the layouts that you’ve done for the class and choose your two favorites. Now, that those two layout sketches and do other pages with those same sketches. I have a few that I really enjoyed using - the ones dealing with white space in week #5 were some of my favorites.  I also really liked week #8 when we did layouts with large photographs, especially when it is contrasted with smaller photographs. I love the visual impact.

The element for week #11 is type. Cathy emphasized the idea of only really needing a few fonts. Often the same font can be used for the journaling and the title. The act of making a font bigger for the title can be enough. Additionally using size contrast on a title can be enough as well.

In one layout, we used the same font for the journaling and title. I used Helvetica here.

In another layout, we contrasted the size of the type in the title.

Having a husband in the field of digital image compression does have its advantages. I am able to get clear answers on the differences of various compression schemes and what is lost in each one.  He has written a great article, To Shoot in Camera Raw or JPEG Format, on the subject for scrapbookers.

Once again, the question came up on a scrapbook message board - should I shot in JPEG or RAW? I am in the very small group that shots JPEG.

Feeling I might be missing something, I ran an experiment today. I took several photos of the same object on our hike. According to my camera’s histogram they were good images in terms of lighting. I took a high quality JPEG image then a RAW image of the exact same thing with my digital SLR camera.

I uploaded them to iPhoto, then opened them in Adobe Photoshop. These are the images Straight Out of The Camera:

One is RAW and one is JPEG. The RAW image in 7.3 MB while the JPEG is 3.2 MB. That’s quite a bit of memory differential.

In the top image the sky is bluer than IRL. The bottom one is more accurate in the yellow but a little washed out in the green. Both needed editing. For both I darkened things a bit and added some contrast in the midtones. It took about 1 minute to edit each one. The one on the bottom though - the RAW one - is more true to what we really saw with our eyes.

Two photographs of a bridge with bright sunshine and shade. The top one has correct color and great sharpness. The bottom one is washed out and dull. The top one (JPEG) needed no corrections. The bottom one (RAW) needed the blackest areas to be more black and lightened in the midtones. It also needed sharpening. Again the RAW image is almost twice as large as the JPEG.

Same as above. The bottom image (RAW) is washed out and needs the same correction. The contrast in the JPEG is outstanding.

I understand that RAW images do need to be edited. They are not meant to be taken straight out of the camera without any editing. I did edit the RAW photos in Adobe Photoshop. But what I found is that the quality of the edited JPEG did not exceed what I got straight out of the camera from the JPEG image.

I decided I needed to take some really bad photos (bad lighting) and see which made a better improvement. To be honest, it didn’t matter. A bad photo is a bad photo.

From my experiment with seeing what came straight out of the camera and what I got from editing the RAW files I can feel fine taking my photos in JPEG. The advantages of good high quality images, the time saved for not having to edit every file, the smaller file size and a format (JPEG) that I know will be around longer than probably my camera’s RAW format convinces me to go with JPEG.

This is my camera, my software and my results. I would suggest trying a similar experiment with your own camera and software.

Regardless of your choice to shot in RAW or JPEG, I would highly recommend saving a copy of your image in JPEG. Your camera’s RAW format may not be around in 5 or 10 years. JPEG will. Or maybe your future computer or operating system won’t support your RAW program. But it will support JPEG. I’d hate to see you lose your precious memories.

Here’s the summary of last week:

Denise Gormish: Template

Jesse Edwards: Clean and Serene Solids, designerdigitals
Ali Edwards: Day + Month Labels Brushes, designerdigitals

Layouts done: 13

I finished my gift project. It’s being printed by Shutterfly and now I am awaiting its arrival….

I’ve started a project for 2009 to take a photograph a day. That’s my goal but I’m not going to pressure myself to do it. I missed one day (a lazy Monday) but was “saved” by my husband who took a photograph while in Japan.

I’ve collected the photos into a scrapbook page - one page per week. I am stuck on how to do the title page and the first page (only 3 days in the first week) but I need to move forward before I got too far behind. So, here are the pages from week two and week three. They are a very simple style designed from a template I created. I am a big fan of the 9 square grid so I used that as a jumping point making 7 squares for the photos and combining the last 2 squares for journaling.

Partially done: 6 layouts

Completely done: 6 layouts

I have two weeks of class to finish, week #11 and #12. I have a basic sketch and idea for the layouts, but I have put them aside for now. I’m on a detour. Here’s why:

For Mike’s mom I made her a digital scrapbook for Christmas. It consisted on pages from our life January - June. It was not all the pages. That would have been about 100 pages. This was 25 selected pages. Well, her birthday is in February and it is my goal to give her a book with July - December done. Of coarse, I haven’t scrapped all those pages yet so I have to do some of those! I went through all my pictures and figured out which 12 (!) pages I need to do. So, I have about 3 weeks to do 12 pages. How am I doing? Well, I’ve got the photos on pages, titles and journaling done on all of them. Now, to tweak them with my wonderful Designer Digital products.

Partially done: 11 layouts

Completely done: 1 layout

I am SO catching up here!

In week #10 Cathy Z. took a look at the huge topic of color. We have  been discussing color all along with various color combinations to try. This week, she discussed the basics of color theory but then shared her approach to color. She looks for 4 colors in her photographs that may work. She may narrow them down to 2 or 3 colors but then she looks for papers and embellishments in those colors. Next, she will work with the proportions.

We did a couple exercises of picking 4 colors from the photograph and then narrowing it down to 2 or 3 colors. I learned that I am really more comfortable with a two color plus neutral combination. I am addicted to white especially for the journaling and/or background colors. I did two layouts this way, but I won’t post the pictures because they are group shots.

Here is a two-page layout to share. In this layout, I picked a favorite color (blue) then used it as a triad color scheme for my layout. I ended up with this blue, red and yellow layout. Not typical Christmas colors but kinda fun!

Journaling:    Our Christmas celebrations begin each year the day after Thanksgiving when the tree gets put together and decorated. It is usually a one-day job but this year we had to stretch it out a few days.
I had more than usual to do since we had just returned from southern California. In one day I had prepared and served our Thanksgiving meal. I still had plenty of clean-up to do so the girls put the tree together themselves on Friday. When I went to string on the lights there were several strands not working. Mike used his engineering skills to try to fix them but to no avail. After a trip to Target on Saturday, I was able to finish stringing the lights. The girls decorated the tree. Finally, I finished the decorations and we had our pretty tree up and ready for the holiday.

Jesse Edwards: Clean and Serene Solids, Title Lines 2

Ali Edwards: Harvest Cardstock, Holiday Word Art , Holiday Title + Journal Photo Overlays

Mindy Terasawa: Winter Sparkle Paper Pack

Anna Aspnes: MonoBlendz Berry Poinsetta Paperie

Pattie Knox: Shimmer Me Tidbits: Starry Night , Pin It On Tinsels

All above from http://www.designerdigitals.com

Sue Cummings/Taylormade: True Magic Christmas v2-3 at O’scraps

Font: Garamond

Layout and concept provided by Cathy Zielske’s Design Your Life workshop at Big Picture Scrapbooking