I'm SO excited...

Just 5 more followers and we get to do the final draw for a free Digi Stamp!  YAY!  :)

I have a question for all of you and I am sure the answers will be different across the board.

1. What program(s) do you use for editing digital stamps?
The answer will help me answer questions for people who are just getting into digital stamping.  I personally use Photoshop, but of course this is not what most use, to my knowledge.  I recently had a nice lady who told me she uses Microsoft Powerpoint - which I found shocking as I thought it was just for slide shows (this just shows you how long it has been since I used this program - probably 20 years now).  I actually had to You Tube it to see if you could crop a picture, and was a little surprised to see that it does. I figured it might, but wasn't certain.  You learn something new everyday folks!  Hehehe!  Another lady said she uses Microsoft Office Word - which is also shocking as it does not support PNGs (at least my 2007 version doesn't).  I knew you could add images and resize, so it MUST have a crop tool somewhere.  It took me a few minutes to find the crop tool - and I'm not going to lie - I was surprised that it had a crop tool as I have only used the program for typing letters or asset lists for work. Now I'd really be shocked if someone were to tell me that your NEWER version of Microsoft Office Word supports PNGs.  I want to be able to provide my customers with the proper customer support they deserve by educating myself on the programs that YOU, the customers use.  Thanking you in advanced!  :)

UPDATE:  One of my wonderful blog followers informed me today (April 30th) that Microsoft Word does support PNGs. Well, I had to figure this out b/c when  I go file > Open, it doesn't show my PNGs. *HEAD SCRATCH* This is how I open files from other programs. It wasn't long before I noticed you had to go to Insert > Picture. Wow! I also discovered you can drag and drop the images.  I think I already knew this, but assumed it didn't work for pngs. Please note - this doesn't keep it a PNG. It turns it into a jpeg - no more transparent background when I drag it into Photoshop from Word. I suppose if you're using Word to open images for your projects, you wouldn't really need a PNG, but it works just fine for cropping, and resizing.  Mystery solved!  Thanks "Aunty Sue"!   :)

2. Do you find PNGs a pain in the buttocks?
This was all I was selling in my shop, and have recently spent days converting everything over to both PNGs and JPGs for my customers.  I have just recently started to send both.  I know most of you use the PNGs fine, but there are some crafty ladies who have trouble with this format and I usually convert for them upon request no problem.  Why do you think they are unable to use these files?  I often second guess myself for using pngs as my main file format, to me they are the best. What are your thoughts?

REDONKULOUS DESIGNS' RANDOM TIP

Redonkulous tip #1:  Did you know that every time you save a JPG image it deteriorates the quality?  Probably not enough to notice in your digi stamps, but this is why I provide my customers with PNGs for digis and clipart.  PNGs are "non-lossy" files, meaning it will not degrade the image quality.  They are also awesome if you want to paint digitally because the white surrounding the black line-work or image are transparent!  So ladies and gents, don't be afraid to get crafty digitally!  It's fun...AND there's an UNDO button for mistakes...and for people like me who make a lot of them.  Hehehe!

There, I hope you have learnt something new today too.  :)  Hope you all had a super fun and crafty weekend!  Back to the drawing board for me!