How to Crop Photos into Shapes for Scrapbooking

Video Transcript

"Welcome back to Expert Village. I'm your host Grace Fraga, with "Arts and Crafts and Everything Fun". And today my guest, Sonya Shephard is going to teach us how to scrapbook. So, what is the next step to scrapbooking? The next step; we're still in the cropping of the photos, but it's now getting into some of the fun shapes. Different things that you want to do to your photos that maybe you don't feel comfortable doing free-hand. We have a great tool. Its call the Fiskars shape cutter and it works... It works from here. Right. It works with these templates. These really great plastic templates. It's a cutting cartridge that's basically like an Exacto knife in a carriage. And so, like you said, we've got the different shapes; squares, diamonds, ovals, words, the letters. That sort of thing. You can just use this to create those shapes. And, today we are going to use the circle template to crop our photos with the circle template. OK. And that's the last one that I'm showing. That's the last one, at the very bottom, of course. Of course. Right here. Ok. So, what we do, is we've got the shape cutter here. I've already taken off the spacer because you can actually use the shape cutter free hand. I don't know who would use it for free hand; because we're not always that talented, but it's still sort of fun. You play around with it a little bit. But anyhow, I've taken off the spacer, and I'm going to put my template down on top of the photo. Now, I've got two photos here. One is, you've got this little bitty bit of action right here. It's in the middle of a lot of other things in the photo, and we want to draw attention to what's happening here on the stage, so we're going to pick a pretty small circle to crop. We're going to put our photo down on the cutting mat. You want to make sure you have a cutting mat. You don't want to ruin your surfaces. Because this will cut through and leave a mark. Definitely. So use your cutting mat, then you put your template on top. Now you want to make sure that the Fiskars logo is on top and that you can read it. Why is that? Well, it won't cut properly if it's upside down. I don't know the mechanics behind it, but it won't cut properly. That's what you know for sure. That's what I know for sure. So, do you try different shapes and see? You try different shapes; you sort of just see what you want to pick it. I think that that one is really great; this small one in the middle. You also want to make sure that your pressure has been adjusted on your blade so that it's going to have enough to cut through your picture. So I'm going to hold it on the finger grips there. This is basically like an Exacto knife right in there. We're going to slide and glide and cut our photo out. Just like that. Almost. Almost. It scores it enough so that you can pull it all the way out. If you need to, you can use some trimmers to cut around. But I do recommend that you try this on some paper, some scratch paper. Get used to the feel of the blade, the way that it's cutting. Make sure that you have a nice sharp crisp blade so that you can make a clean cut. Definitely. And what a difference. Now you can see like a little picture that you can see that was completely lost in this whole huge nonsense. We've now zoomed in on the most important part of the photo. How great. This is so much fun. What is the next step that we are going to learn? The next step is we are just going to talk about adding some texture to your layout. Because you want to make sure that you are not just using photos, but that you are using words to tell your story as well. Oh, that sounds fun. That is coming up next."