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Using Bad Photos on Your Layouts

It is a huge disappointment when you are looking through your photographs to create a layout and realize that the photographs you planned to use for an event are blurry, out of focus, too dark, too light or the focal object is cropped. Don’t despair, there are ways to use those photographs or get your message across without throwing out those photographs. Read on to learn more.

Everyone winds up with a photograph that is normally deemed unusable at some point or another. From blurry to red eye to over exposed, there are dozens of things that can go wrong. There have been several times where I only snapped a couple of photographs of an event and they all turned out bad. So what do you do in that case.

You make the most of it.

Several years ago I took some photographs at a Boy Scout function and every single photograph I got back from the event has this redish tint across it. It was really hard for me when I finally sat down to scrapbook the photographs because my son had chosen to leave scouting already and those were all I had of the event.

Well, I used them anyway. The photographs didn’t look so great on my layout, but I decided to tell the story anyway in my journaling. I made sure that the focus stayed on the bad photographs, which yes, there was no denying how awful they looked. I told about the event in my journaling, while beginning the journaling with something along the lines of, “When I got these photographs back, I was saddened to realize that your final event in scouting had not been captured well at all. These photographs look awful, but I had to use them anyway.”

There is nothing wrong with using a bad photograph in your albums. You can tell the story, or you can even try to manipulate the photograph using photo editing software. Red eye isn’t as much a problem anymore. You can choose to use a red eye pen if it is a photograph printed from a negative. Or if it is a digital photograph, most software programs come with the ability to manipulate the eye and cause the red to vanish. Wonderful! Oh, and pet eye works the same way and there are pet eye pens available too.

Remember to make the most of a bad photograph, include it in your layout and simply tell the story about why you wanted to include that photograph. We are all human and not every photograph is going to turn out.

Nicole Humphrey writes articles for the Scrapbooking Blog and for the Frugal Blog. She also guest blogs on a variety of topics. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.

Related Articles:

Using Bad Photos On Your Layouts

Ten Most Common Photo Mistakes Scrapbooker’s Make (two part series)

Negative Storage

10 Things Most Damaging to Photographs