Design Reviver

Design Reviver is a resource for web designers, but there is a lot of good information and freebies available for scrappers.  There you will find tutorials, freebies, inspiration, and other useful information.  Good design matters whether you are creating a web site or scrapping your babies first steps.

Over 300 free vintage style textures and burshes are available, and over 200 textures, brushes and fonts are avaiable for grunge lovers.   These two catagories of freebies are the most obviously useful to scrappers, but there is more to be had.

Hi Baidu

Hi Baidu is a non English blog that I wish I could read. I don’t know what the terms of use is on the awesome abundance of free brushes and vector art, styles, patterns, custom shapes etc on this site, but I think it is safe to assume that personal use is ok.  At least there are English sub-titles in the index, and that should be enough to help you navigate your way around this treasure trove.

This site is best viewed in Internet Explorer, or if you use FireFox you will need the IE tab add-on installed.   The download link can be a little hard to find, just look for the cartoon character waving and pointing, and if you have the option it seems to work better to choose the “Ziddu” option.

The eps files are usually associated with Photoshop, but they will open in Elements.  Try using them as an overlay or texture with soft light or overlay blend. You can also resize them and place on your image using the above blend modes.

Did I mention there were over 500 FREE brushes! 

How to Fix Pet Eye in Your Photos

“How to Fix Pet Eye in Your Photos” is a tutorial written by Sue Chastain, a well-respected graphics software authority who has been producing About.com’s Graphics Software Web site since February 1999.

Pet eye is the glowing white, green, red, or yellow eye reflections that you often get when taking photos of pets or other animals in low light conditions when a flash is used.  Up until I read this tutorial the best method I knew of for removing “pet eye” was to find a picture of a “good eye” and clone it onto the picture that needed fixing.  The technique described in this tutorial is much simpler and will work for the vast majority of cases.  The instructions are written for Photoshop, but will work in any graphics program that uses layers.

Blog Amuki

Blog Amuki is a non-english blog that is packed full of great resources, especially if you like grunge!   Lists of fonts, textures, images, brushes, tutorials etc can all be found here.  Most of the links are to English language sites so navigation is easy, and the wealth of info is well worth your time to check out!

Qbrushes

Can you ever have enough brushes?  Qbrushes is great site for free photoshop brushes.  You can browse by catagory or tags and even submit your own creations that you would like to share.

There are some very nice grunge brushes for those of you that like to distress your layouts a bit.  And for those that prefer swirls and florals there are plenty of those too.  And be sure and check out the paper brush set, lots of fun scrapping possibilities with those.

Scrap-Gratuit

Scrap-Gratuit is a well organized digiscrap freebie site.  While most of the site appears to be in French, there is enough English scattered about to make it easy for non-french speakers to find their way around.

Categories of freebies include: Alphabets, Cartes, Embellissements, Kits coordonnées, Mini-Album, Papiers, Pages Rapides and Templates.

In addtion to the wealth of freebies this site also has a forum, gallery and shop that contains a lot of unique items and a large selection of commercial use products.

NBK Scrap

NBK is the blog of German designer Nicole K. who is a very inventive and eclectic digiscrap artist. I haven’t been able to glean much information about her, but her designs speak for themselves so stop by and take a look.

An example of just one of her many freebies:

The Daily Scrapper

The Daily Scrapper (TDS) creates, collects and publishes news, entertainment, opinion, and information to the digital scrapbook community. This online site is the brainchild of Alice Koh from AliceKohDesigns.com. The first issue was released this week, and was a full featured issue with articles, interviews and tutorials plus freebies and samples.

Digi Scrappers Corner

Digi Scrappers Corner is a new site that offers a store, a blog, a few freebies and a handful of tutorials for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. There is also a free newsletter available.

The site is bright and cheerful with good navigation. Because it is so new the product offering in the store is a little sparse, but they do offer some hybrid gifts through Cafe Press.

Digital Scrap Wiki

Digital Scrap Wiki is an relatively new online community and resource for digital scrapbooking. It’s a wiki so the content is created and maintained by it’s members. Currently, you can edit and comment on Digital Scrap Wiki as long as you have a Wetpaint account.

The site acts as a compendium of resources for and on digital scrapbooking, including information on digital scrapbooking equipment, software, designers, blogs, magazines, and online retailers.