Cropping Your Photos for Scrapbooking
The secret to making your scrapbook pages interesting and exciting is in cropping your photos for scrapbooking. If you take a couple of photos and just paste them in the book, then you really haven’t gone much beyond a photo album. When you take time to crop your photographs, you can really focus people’s attention where you want. And it transforms boring into beautiful.
Cropping is best for removing distracting elements. When you have a photograph of a certain event, you want to highlight the people and the places connected with that event. Grab a couple of photos and take a look at the background. Does it contain things that add to the memory, like the venue or the weather? Or do you see things in the background that distract from your message, like a stranger wandering by or a public restroom? Artful cropping of your scrapbooking photos give you the option of removing items that draw attention away from the subject, and leaving in items that enhance the photo.
When cropping photos for your scrapbook, it is best to crop in straight edges. Making shapes out of your photos may be fun and may seem creative, but more often than not it ends up just making your page look cluttered and busy. The perfect tool for cropping photos is a good paper cutter. You can find a wide selection of paper cutters in craft supply superstores and office supply stores. But if you want to get started without spending extra cash, you can always use scissors, a pencil and a ruler. These will work just fine.
Depending on how you arrange your page, you may be able to overlap your photos and eliminate the need to crop at all. Just arrange the photo that needs cropping on the bottom, and then cover the distracting element with another photo. Remember, try this on your work surface without glue. Arrangements that look good in your mind may not work out so well on paper.
By the way, if you are using the ruler and scissors method, you may want to try using some decorative shears. These special scissors will cut in straight lines but are made to add a subtle variation to the edge. You can find all sorts of decorative scissors at a craft supply shop or online.
One final caution: if you still have Polaroids in your photo collection, you cannot crop them. Polaroids contain acid (there were self-developing, remember?) and if you crop them, the acid will leak out along the edge and ruin your other photos. If your scrapbook won’t be complete without the Polaroids, then mount them without cropping using a photo sleeve or photo corners.
