Serif Digital Scrapbook Artist 2

Creating a scrapbook should be fun, and Serif’s Scrapbook Artist 2, which is similar to its popular Pageplus desktop publishing program, is designed to make it just that.

First impressions were good: installation was simple but we wouldn’t recommend installing all 70 of the fonts on offer, which will clutter up your computer (they can be installed individually later).

If you do have too many fonts we recommend Cfont Pro.

There are five templates supplied, which the program calls Digikits, and more can be downloaded from the internet, some for a fee. Each template has five layouts. Digikits can also be created from scratch and there are plenty of images, frames and layouts from which to choose.

Once this is done and the actual editing begins, things get a little more complicated and more like a standard desktop publishing program.

The interface is busy, with lots of different windows. For example, it took us some time to work out how to replace the sample photos. The answer was in the help files, which we found fairly easily, but it wasn’t clear immediately. Photos should be added to the Photos panel and can then be dragged onto the photo frame, where they are automatically rotated to match the frame.

Digital Scrapbook Artist's sister programs Pageplus and Webplus (the equivalent programs for page and website design) both include videos as well as PDF excerpts from the full printed manual. There are lots of similar videos included in Scrapbook Artist 2, but we found them hard to find among the toolbars.

For those willing to explore the options, there are some powerful tools included. The stencils are good for arty effects: drag and drop a stencil onto a page, then use the paint tool and then lift the stencil from the page. Established users will recognise this as what’s normally called a mask but Serif deserves credit for making the process very accessible here.

Scrapbook pages can be printed, exported as PDFs or uploaded to the Serif Daisy Trail website.

While it might not live up to the expectation of being as simple as cutting and gluing photos, Serif Digital Scrapbook Artist 2 has enough feautures that it rewards the time spent learning how to use it and is a good way of making impressive albums.