Nuts4Digi

This month marks the one year anniversary of Nuts4Digi, which is the creation of Fiona Renwick and Debbie McKenzie. It is Australian owned and operated, but you don’t have to be an Aussie to be member.

The site features a forum with a wide variety of challenges, a resource & searchable quote directory, a monthly newsletter with tips, tutorials, kit reviews and a freebie or two. There is also a shop that includes a section of commercial use resources along with kits, elements, templates etc. The blog features sketch challenges as well as tips and tutorial, and it is worth stopping by for a look!

Party Time at Digiscrap Info!

Digiscrap Info is celebrating their 1st birthday with a birthday bash that wraps up with a chat on January 31st at 10am eastern. While the party is nearly over, it is not to late to win some great prizes including a $50 gift certificate to Viovio!

Digital Scrapbooking TV – Episode #3

Digital Scrapbooking TV has released episode #3. It contains two easy tutorials followed by an interview with Betsy Tuma about the software she created with her husband called Preset Viewer.

The tutorials in this episode are:

• Blending a photo into your background paper (PSE5)
• Fixing a photo that suffers from both under and over exposure. (PSE5)

There is also a contest to win a copy of Tumasoft’s Preset Viewer. All you have to do is leave a comment on the site and tell them what you thought about this episode. The cutoff date for the comments is January 30, 11:59PM EST.

toNoodle

toNoodle is a monthly subscription site with video tutorials for scrapping with Photoshop and Elements. Current price is $15 a month, with auto-renewal unless you cancel before the end of 30 days Currently the majority of tutorials on the site are written for PSE5, with a handful for CS3.

Based on the four sample videos available for viewing, the video tutorials are well put together and professional looking. Information is presented in a logical and easy to follow format. While most of the topics listed, do appear to be geared toward the scrapper who is new to the software, there is good information to be gleaned even for more experienced scrappers.

The site does not provide information on the gentleman that is doing the tutorial videos, but a testimonial on the site refer to him as “Cameron”.

PSP Tutorial Links

PSP Tutorial Links is a resource that will soon be disappearing, so if you are a PSP user you need to check this site out today! Since they site owner is planning on “taking this site down sometime around the end of 2007″, they have given permission for folks to copy the information for personal use only.

Topics categories include, but are not limited to:

Backgrounds
Brush Downloads
Filters
Frames Downloads
Framing Effects
Gradient Downloads
Masks and Selections Downloads
Photo Retouching
Presets Downloads
Scrapbooking
Scripts Downloads
Shapes Downloads
Text Effects

The wealth of info available on this site is staggering, and it will defiantly be a loss to the PSP community.

Tutorial Kit

Tutorial Kit is a comprehensive resource of Adobe Photoshop tutorials and tips to help users of all skill levels reach their full potential. The tutorials are updated daily from different authors and sites so that you won’t have to spend hours searching the web for them yourself. Tutorials are available in both written and video format.

While this is not a scrapping site, it does have a lot of tutorials that would apply to scrapping especially in the “special effects” category. There are also some interesting text effect tutorials, and the textures & patterns tutorials will help you learn how to make unique backgrounds for your layouts.

PSP Tutorials

PSPTutorials.org is a comprehensive resource of categorized Paint Shop Pro tutorials. It features such categories as: Graphic Design and Drawing, Photo Correction and Retouch, Vector, Animation and other Paint Shop Pro tutorials.

While this is not specifically a digiscrapping site, many of the tutorials definitely have their place in creating layouts. For example, tutorials include instruction son how to make flowers, carve wood text, make lace butterfly’s and create rippled frames.

While most of the tutorials are wriiten ones with screen shots, there are a few video tutorials as well. This site has a wealth of info for the paint shop pro users.

Retouch Pro

Retouch Pro is not a scrapping site, but we have all taken photos that could use a little enhancement to look their best and that is where Retouch Pro tutorials come in to the picture. The written and video tutorials on this site cover a wide variety of techniques including restoration, enhancement, manipulation and photo art.

The majority of the tutorials are for Photoshop, but many of them can easily be done in Elements as well. There are also the occasional PSP tutorials. Each tutorial is rated by the site members so it is easy to tell at a glance which are the the most popular tutorials.

Update on Digiscrap Designer

On December 25th, Digiscrap Designer abruptly closed with no notice to subscribers or designers. Many disgruntled customers filed complaints with Paypal and/or their credit card companies. The only contact any of the subscribers had with the site owner was when she disputed the fraud claims. After nearly a month of being closed, the site reopened this week in a very limited form.

Some, but not all, subscribers received an email telling them that the site was open and that their subscriptions had been extended for 30 days. The email did not include an explanation or an apology from the site owner.

Less than two dozen tutorials are currently available, and those are written in a format that requires scrappers to keep moving clicking to the next page after only a short paragraph. The results is a very disjointed and hard to follow tutorial.

Her purpose may be thwart digital piracy, but the reality is that it has resulted in many very unhappy customers who feel that they are not getting what they paid for when they signed up for a subscription.

Video Guide to Photoshop Elements

Philip Andrews’ video guide to Photoshop Elements is a regular podcast that is published in association with his three best selling Elements’ titles:

•Adobe Photoshop Elements – A visual introduction to digital photography

•Advanced Photoshop Elements for digital photographers

•Adobe Photoshop Elements A-Z – Tools and features illustrated ready reference

There are over two dozen video podcasts available for viewing, and while the video screen is a little on the small side, the information provided is worth it.

Some of the topics covered include:

• Elemental Brush control
• Elements retouching tips
• Swap skies from one photo to another
• Push-pull your images with the Liquify filter
• Control the effects of adjustment layers with masks
• Mastering selections
• Adding some zip to your pictures