For those like me, who use ACDSee Photo Manager 9 for digital organisation (both photographs and digital scrapbooking elements), one frustration is that the background for transparent images (ie PNGs) is set to white. This means that if you have a white PNG, such as a chalk overlay or white wordart - you can’t see it against the white background.

ACDSee does allow the background colour to be changed. Here are the steps -

1. From the ACDSee Browser menu select Tools | Plug-ins | Plug-in settings.
2. In the ‘Plug-in Settings’ dialog, select the ‘Image Decode’ tab (this should be the first one already displaying)
   
3. From the plug-ins list scroll down to select ‘IDE_ACDStd.apl’ and click the ‘Properties’ button.
4. From the ‘About IDE_ACDStd’ dialog box change the background colour. Click on the colour itself to give you more colour selection choices - it will look like a rainbow.
5. ’OK’ this selection, once chosen.  Then ‘OK’ out of the Plug-in Settings dialog. Note this will change the background on all your images, so choose a colour which makes it easy to denote as the background such as bright pink or green. Else, once you’re previewed those pesky white pngs, change the colour back to white or perhaps a grey.
   

This is an email that everyone on the planet must have gotten. I still love it, and it would make an interesting journal theme for a scrapbook layout. And sadly, it’s recorded here for posterity - because I did just about all of this in sequence when I first read it.

YOU KNOW YOU ARE LIVING IN 2005 when…

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

2. You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don’t have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.

8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.

10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )

12. You’re reading this and nodding and laughing.

13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this
message.

14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

15. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn’t a #9 on this
list.

AND NOW U R LAUGHING at yourself.

Go on, forward this to your friends. You know you want to.

1. Choose a reasonably thick felt-tip pen (Zig Writers .05 nib are good) and go forth and doodle on plain white paper. (The good thing about this technique? - 1. if you’re not happy, just screw it up and chuck it at your family or 2. Even better - get your children to do it for you - they’re natural doodlers with no inhibitions)
2. Scan your doodle in at high resolution for detail.
3. Open the scan into your digital software / photo editor.
4. Clean up the scan - normally most photo editors now-adays have a one-step Fix Photo option which will generally intensify the contrast. If this doesn’t work, use the manual contrast and brightness buttons to intensify the image as much as possible so that you have a nice bright white around the doodle.
5. If you haven’t already, set the background image to a layer image - normally this is simply selecting the image in the layer palette (you’ll only have one layer), right-clicking and choosing the "Promote Background" option.
6. Choose your magic wand selection tool, and click on the white around the doodle - this should select all of the white of the paper background. If not, play around with your tolerance settings for the magic wand tool - these should be in the tool bars above your editing windows.
7. If you have any white bits inside your doodle, press your control button plus click on these with the magic wand still selected.
8. Once you have all the white selected with the dancing ants selection lines, hit the delete button. Select—>None to get rid of your selection lines, and the doodle will now be surrounded by transparency (normally checkered background). Crop the doodle, then save as a .png file. You can now use this to overlay on any of your digital projects.
   

Some permutations

1. Instead of deleting the white background to make a .png file of your doodle, leave the white background and create the doodle as a brush file. This involves exporting as a brush from your file menu. Create a whole collection of doodle brushes and export as a brush set.
2. Whilst you still have the white paper background, use your magic wand tool to select internal white areas (play around with your tolerance tools to ensure you only select that area you want) and use the Paint Bucket tool to fill this selection area with a colour chosen from your colour mixer. (Or even a gradiant). This is how you colour things like butterflies etc.
3. Once you have the png file itself (normally in basic black), use the Magic Wand tool again to select this black (tolerance normally very low). Then use the Paint Bucket to fill this selection with colour - change black to yellow or red for instance.  Sometimes this thickens the outline a little, so be careful about how you select using the magic wand selection tool in the first place. Play around with things like feathering, and other tool options to ensure you select as close as possible to the edge of the black.
   

The following list was posted on a community forum, but was sourced from elsewhere.

Do not delete the following System Fonts:

Arial (TrueType)
Arial Bold (TrueType)
Arial Bold Italic (TrueType)
Arial Italic (TrueType)
Courier 10,12,15 (VGA res)
Courier New (TrueType)
Courier New Bold (TrueType)
Courier New Bold Italic (TrueType)
Courier New Italic (TrueType)
Marlett (Windows 95/98)*
Modern (Plotter)
MS Sans Serif 8,10,12,14,18,24 (VGA res)
MS Serif 8,10,12,14,18,24 (VGA res)
Roman (Plotter)
Script (Plotter)
Small fonts (VGA res)
Symbol (TrueType)
Symbol 8,10,12,14,18,24 (VGA res)
Times New Roman (TrueType) -
Times New Roman Bold (TrueType)
Times New Roman Bold Italic (TrueType)
Times New Roman Italic (TrueType)
Wingdings (TrueType)
Any font with a red A for its icon.
Any font that begins with the letters MS.

*Marlett is a hidden system file and it will not show up in a search, however, it may show up in your program font lists.

Program Specific Fonts Required:

Some fonts are required by particular common programs. Do not delete these also.

Avant Garde Oblique BT (TrueType)
Avant Garde Medium BT (TrueType)
Avant Garde Medium Oblique BT (TrueType)
Book BT (TrueType)
CommonBullets (TrueType)
FuturaMedcondBT (Corel’s # TT0201M.TTF)

Print Artist

Palisade

Windows Draw

Swiss921 BT
(Also see page 4 of the manual for Windows Draw 6 Print Studio, and page 27 of the manual for Complete Publisher ‘99 for a list of fonts that must be installed for the text styles and templates to appear properly.)

Create-a-card

Swiss721 BT
(Create-a-card also has fonts that begin with CAC - these can be removed, however, some of the included projects may not display correctly.)

Internet Web Browsers

Webdings

Office 97 (including Outlook 98)

Tahoma
Quickbooks
Four fonts that all start with "Quicktype"
MS Bookshelf
Three fonts called Bookshelf Symbols 1-3

Picture It

Comic Sans and Comic BD 

Digital templates are all the rage nowadays - particularly the ones with curvy outlines or large curves, to produce those curvy layouts which are such a hot trend at the moment.

Templates like these generally come in a black or greyed out png file - they are a solid shape with a transparent background. So here’s several methods for using these to cut out the shape from patterned digital papers.

Method 1 - Selecting Shape with Inversion

1. Open the template into your photo editing program, and set this as a bottom layer.
2. Open the patterned paper and set this as a layer directly above the template layer.
3. Make the template layer active (select it in your layers pallette) and using your selection tools (the magic wand will generally work, or use your keyboard shortcuts) select the template so that the shape is selected.
4. Activate the patterned paper layer - the selection of template shape will still be showing.
5. Invert your selection —> normally this is via your Selection Menu and choosing Invert Selection. This will create a selection on the background surrounding the shape.
6. With the patterned paper layer still active, hit the Delete key (Or Edit —> Clear for some photo editors) - the inversion selection will be deleted, leaving the patterned paper layer now in the shape of the template.
7. Delete the template layer from underneath.

Method 2 - Clipping Masks

1. As with Method 1, open the patterned paper in a layer above the template layer
2. Activate the Paper layer, and create a clipping mask (In Photoshop CS2 this is Alt+Ctl+G; in Photoshop CS it is Ctl+G; in other photo editors there will be different methods).
3. With the paper layer active still, and the clipping mask in effect, select Layers —> Merge Down.
4. Alternatively - if the paper layer is not directly above the template layer, then select both the paper and template layer and link these as a group, then select Layers —> Merge Group or Merge Linked (whichever is appropriate).

A Digital Designer was having reports from a PSP 7 user that the png files in their kits were coming out all “wonky”.

There are two answers to this one -

• In PSP, you have to use the .png optimizer. Go to file, export, png optimizer. Then be sure that “alpha channel transparency” is checked. Then it will save with your background transparent.
• Ensure the PSP copy has been patched with the latest updates. Run a google search for “Paint Shop Pro Patch” and you should be able to find it…

Reference : 2Peas boards question, 3rd August 2005

When you start being bitten by the digital scrapbooking bug, you inevitably end up collecting digital brushes for your photo editing program. If you load too many of these up into the program, this slows down the program performance, especially when initially starting up the program.

The best way to deal with this is to organise your brush collection outside of the program itself, and only load up the required brushes you need at the time of creating a layout. Here's a tip for organising your brush collection: -

1. Use your photo application to create a page of the brushes in a collection - white as a background. Title it with the brush name and folder these are stored in, the designer, and whatever other details you wish. Use each brush to imprint the brush "graphic" as a sample on the page.
2. Save these pages as jpeg files or similar.
3. You can now browse your brush collection pages in a normal photo album program (a free one being Picasa).

Source: Original idea by Ditzyscrap on 2Peas Board.

Some users (including myself) have encountered problems when unzipping large zipped files of digital elements and kits, where it appears some folders are being created but with no data inside.

This actually happens where folders are being created in unzipping, at the 7th or 8th level from the root drive. For people saving their elements to a sub-directory off the root drive (ie My Documents* or a sub-directory under MyDocuments) then the unzip may be trying to create sub-sub folders past the folder allowances. The pathname to point Windows to find those deep elements will be too long to cope with, resulting in corrupt files, blank folders, and error messages in the unzipping.

The best way to resolve this is to create a Scrapping directory directly off your root (or c:// drive), save the downloaded files there, and then unzip and organise the digital elements from there.

1. Go to Windows Explorer or My Computer.
2. Double click on your C: drive or another drive you want to use for storing your digital scrapping stuff.
3. When the drive is open, go to File> New > Folder
4. Name the folder. (My Scrapping Stuff, etc)

* The MyDocuments folder is actually not an immediate subdirectory off from c:// - instead the pathname is already c://windows/mydocument/whatever... which means that you already have at least 3 folders involved before you even start unzipping some digital files. If the zipped files are then trying to unzip other zipped files into several directories deep, this explains how you can run out of folder space (computers only allow a certain amount of subfolders - around 6 at a maximum).

Print any words or phrases you want on acid free paper.
Stamp or chalk or otherwise colour the paper as desired.
Cut into strips and put adhesive on the back - suggest this could be jac paper, put through the xyron, or maybe something else. ( or you could put the adhesive on the back first and then cut into strips)
Place a length of fine wire down the length of the strip.
Stick a complimentary piece of paper on the back of the strip to cover the wire - instant twist tie.

Source: some forum, then copied onto the Kiwiscraps forum.