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Here is a very interest theme that will give you hours of fun making and the greatest satisfaction to give someone you love. Say it is your father’s birthday or your parents anniversary or maybe Christmas and you want that perfect gift for that someone in your life that has everything. Go through all the old pictures, ask other family members to contribute too. Make a photobook of family memories that would have been seen through the eyes of the person you are making the book for. As an example I am showing you a book that I made for my mom and dad for Christmas last year.
My parents are now 87, but I’m sure that in their minds, they’re still young. I bet these pictures I found of them, when they were in their best years, will be a fond remembrance of “The Way Were Were”
I went through hundreds of old 35mm slides and photos that we fading and soon would be lost to time itself. I scanned my selection into my computer and in some cases used a graphic program to digital enhance these images. If you cannot do that, I would suggest find someone that has a scanner, those old pictures are important and if you do not have the ability to enhance them, use them as is and make your design look old and worn so the pictures go with the look of the pages.
This is a picture of me. The left photo was falling apart and was beyond repair so I scanned it as is, used the sepia tool to enhance the faded look and made the torn look a part of the design. To contrast, I add two black & white photos and used a faded background. We have loads of wonderful embellishments such as photo corners that you can drag from our website into a folder on your desktop and use on the pages of your photo book. All embellishments should only be used after all pictures are on the pages and you have used the photo enhance tool. If you add before, and use this tool, all embellishment will print black so make sure to do it correctly
I started my photobook by showing pictures of my dad’s parents, my mom’s parents and family. I also included pictures of my parents wedding day. I then picked pictures of my brother and me along with my parents over the years from when we were little, to all grown up. I titled my photobook “THE WAY WE WERE”, a caption that told what my book was about. A really great idea for a book like this was to place a dedication at the front of the photo book, so that I could express my love for my parents. As I am not a poet and wanted it to be just right, I went on the internet and did a Google search for quotes, sayings, and poems about family. Wow, there is so much to look at, and I found several different wordings that inspired me. I took a bit from a few, and re-worded them to fit the way I wanted it to be.
This is a perfect example of a 2 page spread using one photo across the 2 pages and using the fade tool so that the photo acts more like a background. I then added other related photos of my brother at the same age.
Here is the dedication that I put on the opening page of my book. It was the first thing that my parents saw and set the tone of what was to come.
On Christmas morning I gave one copy to my mom and one to my dad and had them open them at the same time. If only you could have seen their eyes swell with tears as they relived those precious moments. This truly was a gift that was special, it came from my heart with all the love that our family had over the years. When I showed this book to my children, they got such a kick out of seeing pictures of all of us as young people. I know in years to come that their children will also get a kick out of it. These family times are now catalogued for eternity. If you make lots of family photobooks, over time, the collection will become family heirlooms to be treasured for generations to come
This wild and crazy picture is of one of my dad’s famous summer Hawaiian theme parties. Since all the people in the photo had a special place in my parents hearts and there were no other pictures to relate to this page I used a special trick. Make a small blank photo frame (the size to fit just their head) one for each people you want to show. Then drop and drag the same picture into each frame, use the + tool and enlarge the picture and move around until you have only that one persons head, therefore using one picture to make many. Make sure the picture is at least 8 x 10 at 300 dpi, so that when enlarged it will not pixelate.
