Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

25
Digital Scrapbooking
In the United States, scrapbooking is more popular than golf. This is a fact, established
in a survey by Creating Keepsakes magazine. Whereas 28.5 million people over the age of
18 play golf, scrapbooking is enjoyed by 32.1 million, or by someone in 1 in 4 American
households, as opposed to 1 in 5 households for golf. Apparently, three-quarters of scrapbookers
actually set aside part of the home as a place where they can perform their hobby
without interference. Novice, intermediate, and dedicated scrapbookers spend $1,000,
$1,700, and $2,300 respectively every year on their hobby, which, as software developers
cannot have failed to notice, is becoming increasingly mechanized with the use of
computer software.
Make no mistake: this is a very important category of photographic software, commercially
perhaps the most important in this entire book. It seems to attract large corporate
developers, companies with parent companies—always sign of success. It also makes it
more difficult for smaller firms to break into the market, because, as you will see, the
large companies have a tendency to blitz the customer with thousands of designs, clipart,
templates, and fonts. If one of them offers 40,000 graphics, another will respond with
55,000. They make you an offer you can scarcely refuse, but is the simple three-step
scrapbooking program really what people want? Some scrapbooking magazines go
the opposite extreme and publish how-to articles based on using the full version of
Photoshop. Other approaches are pitched sensibly somewhere between these two
extremes of user ability.
Two of the most popular software packages for scrapbooking are discussed elsewhere in
this book: Adobe Photoshop Elements and Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo. It is the liveliness
of the scrapbooking market that has changed Photoshop Elements into what it is
today, not a cut-down version of Photoshop but a program designed to appeal to people