Digital Scrapbook Artist Deluxe

I purchased Digital Scrapbook Artist (DSA) in April 2009 after comparing it to others on this website. I've become a BIG fan of the program and felt it would be helpful to others interested in this product to have someone's opinion that uses it, as I did not when I ordered. I went with a leap in faith and it's paid off. First off, I've been a traditional scrapbooker for years prior to making the switch to digital. The transition from the old paper and scissors method to ditigal has so many advantages. 1. Everything is contained on your computer. No need for room space to layout all your pages. No need to pack up all your supplies after an evening of working on projects. No need to spend time or money printing pictures. 2. A huge plus...you have the creative freedom to add and delete with just the click of the mouse to decide whether or not you like one look over another. There's so much less waste and expense with the digital method. 3. It's easy to share and print your work. Digital Scrapbook Artist offers the ability to save in jpeg, tiff, and pdf formats so that you can easily upload your digital page layouts to online picture printing companines, email to family and friends, and publish on personal websites & blogs. With digital scrapbooking, comes the computer and the need to know the basics of how to operate it. Digital Scrapbook Artist is a user-friendly program that is easy to navigate. The click and drag method onto the workspace is pretty self explanatory, but for those users wanting to gain more skills, the program offers a free membership to it's community website, www.daisytrail.com, where free tutorials are featured online to learn new skills, as well, as Q & A sections that interacts both the program's designers and other DSA users. DSA offers additional content packs with an additional cost, but also allows for import of free or online purchased content from other websites through the photo tab feature. This a large cost savings if you want to expand your content (paper, embellishments, wordart), but don't want spend the extra money on kits. Although, once you get started and love it, I'm sure that you will. As far as DSA is concerned, it's completely met my needs. I recommend going to daisytrail.com and viewing layout pages, created by DSA users and some tutorials, to see if this program has the qualities you're looking for. Here are a few more suggestions for anyone that wants to enter the digital scrapbooking world, that I had to learn the hard way...before you begin creating pages, especially if your end goal is to make a photobook, be sure to research the company that will be making your book. Not all companies offer the same sizes for photoboooks and for sure each company has their own guidelines for page dimensions. To prevent you headaches later on, decide on your company, choose a book size, figure out what page dimensions you need, and then setup your page layout to that size, all of this will prevent you from having to re-format pages that you come to find out don't fit their dimensions at printing time or risk cutting off your page content. Do this BEFORE you start creating the actual pages.