Making your own Embellishments for Digital Scrapbooking

Finding free embellishments can take time and sometimes you don't find what you are looking for.  But you may have a great picture and think, 'Without the background this would look amazing on my page.'  That's what happened to me.  I know I can cut out backgrounds in Photo Shop, but I haven't installed it on my new computer.  Plus I know it's more complicated than what most people want to do.

Sooooo.....since I didn't want to get off the couch and find my Photoshop CDs I went with my default mode:  Google Search!  Low and behold I found out that a background removal tool was added MS Word 2010 and I had that on my computer! 

You can download a FREE version, Office 2010 Starter.  This is what I have.  It comes with Word and Excel with reduced functionality, but it has the background remover tool!  Woohoo!  This means you have free access to a tool to make your own free embellishments for your digital scrapbook.  Don't you just love the word free?  I can't tell you how excited I was!!!!!  Just Google it and you'll find a download available

Now you think I'm going to tell you how to use this wonderful tool.  I'm not.  Instead, here's a video that is a great tutorial:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRjyEBIrDyQ.  Watch, learn, and enjoy.

Now that you know how to remove the background, what do you do with the picture?  How do you get it into the scrapbook?  First, you need to save it as a PNG file.  This type of file saves the background as "see through;" no color, no white, etc.  I looked for a video tutorial and couldn't find one, but here is the step by step process.

1.  Right click on the image (after the background is removed).
2.  Choose "Save Picture As" (yep, that's my crazy cat, Snuggles)

 

3. Choose the location you want to save the file and give it a name.

4. Click the arrow on the right side of the "Save as type" box and choose Portable Network Graphics.

5.  Click "Save" and you are done

Now the picture without a background can be imported into whatever scrapbooking software you use.  Since that depends on your software, I'm going to trust you know how to add embellishments and pictures to your software.  Just be sure you remembered where you saved the file so you can find it again!

Here is a page where I used this technique to crop out my son.

Before:

After:

I had a great picture of a creepy statue from Six Flags Fright Night,

so I cropped out the background:

 

and added it to the page.

For this page I cropped out the people and and a snake head.  Then made a "scene" from them.  I used embellishments from Carena's Designs Old Wild West Sampler Freebie.  (Oh yeah, free again!)  Then added some great snake pictures my son took across the bottom.

Here are some of the embellishments I've made from pictures I took of my ornaments

and then used on this page of my family decorating the tree.

As an aside, the background on this page is a picture I took out of focus of my friends Christmas tree.  Thanks, Kellie!

This is just me playing around.  I cropped out my son doing a force push in his Halloween costume and made him float over the beach.  Honestly, this is what I did when I was learning to use this technique.  May the force be with you as you scrap!