First Attempt at Digital Scrapbooking

[Ashmanarion]

I took some maternity pictures of my best friend a few weeks ago and this week she had her little girl. I wanted to make a collage for them to help celebrate their event. Basically I'm treating it as a 8x10 scrapbook page. When I started copying and pasting pictures into my layout(at least I'll call it that), the pictures got very pixelly. I've cropped the pictures but not changed their size really, so they are very large. How can I get these fairly good pictures to look right in my layout and not look grainy and pixelly?

 

[boBQuincy]

One possibility is the PPI (Pixels per Inch) is set too low. When we start a new image the program shows the PPI and often sets the default as 72, much too low for printing. By resizing the images to fit the page they become very small (in pixel dimensions) and do not look good.

I usually start with 300 PPI, which is optimum for most inkjet printers. If memory is tight try 240 but going below that can lose image quality.