Creating a scrapbook has become a popular way to showcase family and friends, special events and more, and programs such as Serif’s Digital Scrapbook Artist make it easy to create beautiful scrapbooks by using your computer. The program lets you combine your photos, words, and memorabilia to create pages that can be decorated with colorful flowers, designs and other decorative items and then used to create an entire scrapbook or single page remembrances. Your scrapbook pages can be every bit as attractive as those you make by cutting and pasting and such, but with digital scrapbooking, you won’t have to gather all the supplies and find a place and time to do the cutting and pasting.

Digital Scrapbook Artist comes with all you need (and more) to edit photos, add text, and include whatever else you want to create your scrapbook or single memory page to print, save and share with others in a variety of ways. The program has a startup wizard that includes pre-designed pages to make it easy to complete your project quickly, or you can start with a blank page to create your scrapbook from scratch. Either way, it’s easy to change or add your own backgrounds, frames, text and any of the large selection of colorful embellishments included.

We started with the Wizard option, which lets you select a set of pages that include a title page, places for photos and text, and colorful designs and more on each page. You can personalize any part of any page by adding text in a variety of formats and placing it anywhere you want; you can also place photos in the included frames or in new frames, and add to or change any of the decorative elements. Substitute your own photo for the one in any frame by simply clicking on the photo and then clicking on the photo you want in its place. Replace any text by clicking on it and substituting the text you want, or click on the text tool to add your new text in whatever color, size and font you want (there’s a choice of nearly 500 fonts). You can also replace, rotate, move or stretch any decorative element on the page by clicking on the element and choosing what you want to do with it. Rotating and stretching elements is as easy as grabbing the "handles" to make it the size or shape you want. Ditto for moving decorative elements. There’s also an undelete for those "oops" times.

We used the Wizard option to put together some photos from a recent trip, and it didn’t take long to create three colorful pages of happy memories, complete with photos, descriptions and some cool designs on each page.

Digital Scrapbook Artist also makes it easy to create a scrapbook from scratch. There’s an online tutorial and a printed manual to guide you through the process if you need help, but the program is pretty intuitive, so you may just want to follow the screen icons and onscreen hints to put your pages together. You’ll see onscreen options for selecting paper color, background, text, photos, colors, decorative elements and much more. Drawing tools make it easy to paint, color, draw and add many other artistic creations. And, you can select, move, change and replace items, photos and text just as you would by using the Wizard option to have everything just the way you want it.

One especially cool option is the scissors tool, which lets you cut, crop and erase easily and quickly. For example, if you have a flower on a background, you can use the scissors to "cut" the flower out of the background and paste just the flower someplace else. The scissors let you cut in any one of 11 ways, including straight, pinking, curved, and the like. There’s also a good selection of shapes that you can fill with designs, colors, photos and more. Then there are punches to create shapes you can paste anywhere. All fun and easy to do and, of course, likely to be addicting . . .

The program comes with options for printing pages in the popular 12 x 12" size, but other sizes are available, including custom sizes. Extensive photo editing options are included, so you can easily crop, edit, adjust, and even change the entire background of a photo. For example, you can take a photo of someone sitting against a plain background and change the photo so that the person appears to be sitting in front of the Lincoln Memorial, or in a garden, on the beach, or just about any place you like. There are hundreds of design elements in the program, and the included Daisytrail Collection gives you hundreds of other options for backgrounds, pages, elements and more.

Once you have created a scrapbook, you can print it, save it in a variety of formats, have it printed professionally, or post it on the web.

The price of Digital Scrapbook Artist is less than the cost of what you’d easily spend on scrapbook supplies or some scrapbook kits. But aside from the cost savings, there’s the ease of use and the hundreds of choices for preserving those memories, all without leaving your desk. A good value and a fun time in this program.