

One effective use is as an inset into a larger photograph. If you don’t have one of these cutters, take a drinking glass, plate, or any round object of the desired size, trace around it, and cut out the picture.Ĭircles and ovals are very versatile in the way they can be used in a layout. There are shaped templates you can buy, and there are punches for circles up to 2 ½ inches in diameter. One way is to use a special cutting device, available in craft stores, that lets you easily cut circles of any diameter. I simply measured and drew black lines over the photograph. It’s one photograph cropped into 64 one-inch squares and reassembled. Look at the mosaic-like image of the “Field of Tulips” (above). You might want to alternate photos with a plain or metallic paper, patterned paper, or text. These were cropped as two-inch squares, and, of course, you can go larger or smaller. “Tulips” (above) shows another way of putting multiple photos on a page. Because they were overlapping each other, I added mats to separate them. I put two groups of square photos in the “Gorgeous” layout, above, arranging and rearranging the pictures before I pasted them on the background. Hint: to see exactly where you are punching, turn the punch upside down. You can measure and cut out portions of larger photos, but it’s much easier to use a punch. Make them small enough and you have a way to put a lot of photographs on a page. Square photographs are a nice change from rectangles. The picture of the fall foliage, for example, below, is a section of the larger one next to it, right. If you don’t have either of these options, use your scissors or paper trimmer to crop an image to the desired proportion.
#SCRAPBOOK PICTURE SHAPES SOFTWARE#
Some cameras will do it for you automatically, and many software programs can “stitch” individual photographs together. Rounding the corners is a nice touch you may want to use on many photographs.Ī final suggestion about slender photographs is to use a panorama. It’s one photographed sliced into five sections and arranged on a square scrapbook page. The images of the Catalonia Art Museum (above) are not separate photographs. The different lengths of the photos and their staggered placement, with the two side figures facing the center one, make the page work. In a page featuring the dancers from an Asian festival (above), I cropped each image to 2 ½ inches wide. Some photographs work well if you make them even skinnier.

A variation could be to add two or three other, smaller, photographs to the page. I cropped it to four inches wide to make a more dramatic layout.

The original photograph of a window in Venice (above) was 12 inches wide. Lets begin by slicing off a great deal of a photograph to make a long, slender image. And don’t cut Polaroids if you do, potentially dangerous chemicals may ooze out. Work on a copy of a photograph, not the original. Either way, I hope they will encourage you to occasionally try something a bit unusual with your photographs.Ī couple of words of caution. My examples show some cropped photographs as they appear on actual scrapbook pages other examples are just of the cropped photos.

After that, let your creativity take over with variations and other ideas. I’ve given suggestions to get you started. Even easier is to do all the cropping in the computer with an image-editing program. So I hope this article will inspire you to try different types of cropping using scissors, a paper trimmer, punches, or a craft knife. An unusual cropping also can help focus attention on the photograph. If all your pages are filled with rectangular photographs, you can excite the viewer’s interest by changing the format every once in a while. If you had the same meal of steak and baked potato every day, you would eventually get bored and the meal would not seem special any more. The answer may be obvious: to add variety. If the photographs look good, why would we want to change them? It’s changing not only the size but also the shape of the photographs. But cropping for scrapbooking is more than that. If you’ve been doing your own printing via the computer, you’ve undoubtedly cropped some photos to improve the composition. This article is about the first definition– one in which scissors are the important tool. In scrapbookers’ lingo, “crop” also is a noun meaning a gathering of scrapbookers who are working on their pages. Ovals, squares, extreme rectangles can all bring an accent and creativity to how you present your pictures.Ĭrop: verb to cut or trim. When it comes to those typical rectangular photographs, change can be a good thing.
