Using a Digital Scrapbook Page as your Windows Wallpaper

Hi Everyone,

Here’s a fun idea! How about using your favorite digital scrapbook page as your Windows background wallpaper? Or how about creating a special page just for that purpose?

It’s easy to do. If you’re like me, you’re on your computer a lot during the day. So, why not add a background that personalizes your screen?

The one thing you have to keep in mind when doing this is the proportion of your computer screen. In other words, most digital scrapbooking pages are square and most monitors are not.

So, the first thing you have to do is determine the screen resolution that your monitor is running. This way, you can resize your digital scrapbook page to make it fit the screen properly.

To check your screen resolution:

In Windows Vista:

• Select Start>Control Panel>Personalization>Display Settings.
• This will open the Display Settings dialog box. That’s where you’ll find your screen resolution:
• Write down the screen resolution. In the example above, the screen resolution is 1366 x 768.
• Make sure to click on ‘Cancel’ here to avoid changing your screen settings.

In Windows 7:

• Start>Control Panel> Display>Adjust Resolution.
• The screen Resolution dialog box will appear, showing the screen resolution:
• Write down the screen resolution. In this example, you can see that the screen resolution is 1920 x 1080.
• Again, be sure to click on ‘Cancel’ here to avoid changing your screen settings.

Now, you need to resize and crop your digital scrapbook page to the proportion of your screen. Before you do this, make sure to make a copy of your page so that you don’t change your original.

First, resize your image to be the same width as your screen. Since the width size is the larger of your screen resolution numbers, doing this allows you to keep as much of the original page as possible. To do this, choose Image>Resize>Image Size:

Now, resize your image to the width of your screen resolution. In my example above, the width of my screen resolution is 1920 pixels. So, I’ll resize my page to be 1920 pixels wide. Make sure that the box next to ‘Constrain Proportions’ is checked:

Now that you have your image resized, you can crop it using the rectangular marquee tool. Select the rectangular marquee tool and set it to a fixed size. Then, set this size to your screen’s resolution (in pixels). Below, I’m setting the width to 1920 px and the height to 1080 px:

Use the Rectangular Marquee tool to select the area of your page that you want to keep. You can use the spacebar to move the selection outline around on your page until you get it where you like it. Then crop the page by selecting Image>Crop.

Instead of using a scrapbook page that you already have made, you can create a page just for your desktop wallpaper. That’s what I do. This way, I can make sure that the areas of the page that will be behind my desktop icons are relatively bare so that I can still see and read the icons easily.

Here’s a desktop image that I created using photos of my dogs and a quote to remind me that, even when my pooches are driving me crazy when I’m trying to get work done, I still love them! I laid out the photos to fit in with my desktop icons:

When I created this page, I created it in the same size as my screen:

Whether you crop a Digital Scrapbook page that you already have or you create on just for your desktop, after you have the page sized as you need it, save it as a jpeg file by choosing File>Save As and name it and save it.

To set your wallpaper, right click on your desktop and choose ‘Properties’ from the drop down menu. Click on ‘Desktop Background’ and then click the Browse button. Browse to the wallpaper you just created and click Open, then click OK. You’re done!

Happy Scrapping!

Mary

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