All digi tutorials on my site use PSE 5.

So this is something I get asked all the time. How do I print my digital scrapbook pages. People always say their printer doesn’t print 12×12. Well, mine doesn’t either! I still scrap 12×12, but the beauty of digital is that you can always resize it smaller! I resize mine to 6×6 pages (still retaining the original 12×12 for future use) for printing. So here’s my tutorial on how I do that.

I print mine as 6×6 pages. I’m not really sure why - mostly because Kimberly does hers this way and since she taught me all I know, lol, I do mine that way too! I do not print my pages at home (my printer sucks). I get mine printed at Costco. I put together what K calls ‘a slab’ which is 6 6×6 pages on a 12×18 sheet. It costs $2.99 to get a 12×18 printed at Costco. Then I cut them apart and I have 6 6×6 pages! Pretty cheap and I have albums to look at. AND, it’s pretty inexpensive if you want to print extras up for the grandparents or something. (Best part of digital - there’s not time consumption in making duplicates!!!)

So here’s how I do the slabs:

1. Open a new item. Use the dimensions of 3600 x 5400 at a resolution of 300 dpi. Make sure the background contents box says white.

2. This is what you’ll have on your screen.

3. Then open one of your pages and resize it to 1800 x 1800 (or 6×6), but retain the resolution of 300 dpi.

4. Once your page is resized; select (ctrl a), copy (ctrl c) and paste (ctrl v) the page onto your new slab.

5. You will repeat this with 6 different pages (or the same page if you want more than one copy of it). To get your pages aligned correctly, read on!

Select (ctrl a) the thumbnail of your page in the layers palette on the right side.

At the top tool bar (the one closest to your slab in the light gray area) there will be some alignment options. For this I selected ‘align bottom’.

Then I selected ‘align left’.

6. Once you have your slab finished, it will look like this. Then you have two options.

You can flatten your image, save (at high quality - 12) as a .jpg and then upload and print. Kimberly recommended another step because she found that a lot of times she would lose things that were close to the edges. This is how she avoids that…

7. Select (hold down ctrl and click on each thumbnail image in your layers palette) each page and merge layers. You will find this option in the ‘more’ tab at the top of your layers palette. Or you can right click and find that option as well.

8. Then select the pages layer and resize (ctrl t) to 99%. After that flatten your image and save. This will leave a tiny white border around the entire thing so that you don’t lose anything on the edge of the pages.

After that you are free to upload to whatever photo printing site you want! Like I said, I do mine at Costco and have been very happy with the results. I get 6 6×6 pages printed for $2.99 and that seems really reasonable to me! And I can usually pick them up in one hour! I also do mine in glossy because the elements seem to retain more dimension in glossy. Here is what a slab looks like ready to print:

Okay - that’s how I print my pages! I hope that helps y’all understand the way I do it!

***ETA*** <Here> is an additional tip about uploading to Costco! Thanks!***

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