The Ohanaware Weblog

Custom Christmas Card

Create and print your very own custom Christmas cards with Ohanaware’s Mac Photo Editing Software, Funtastic Photos.

This simple tutorial will give you a quick guide into making impressive seasonal cards. Once you’ve completed this tutorial, we’d suggest you to experiment with the other 1-Click Styles and built-in effects so you can truly create your own custom Christmas Card.

Step 1 - Choose Picture

Step 1: Choose an image, choose an image that you think would look good as a Christmas Card, here I choose to use this photo of a family after they have made a snow man.

Step 2 - Crop

Step 2: Crop the image so that the important part is in the center, for this photo I have cropped it so that everyone’s face is in the center. Notice when you move or resize the crop area, grid lines appear allowing to you center items. Its also important to use the Aspect Ratio 3:2, as this creates a nice wide photo (without being too wide).

Step 3 - Stylize

Step 3: Stylize the picture, in this tutorial we’re going to use the “1850s Albumen” 1-Click Style from the “Vintage Camera” section. This effect instantly make the photo look older and more antique. There is a problem, we’ve lost a lot of detail, too much in my opinion. So I click on the “Colorize” effect in the “Advanced Options” and then click on the Color Well and use the Color Wheel to make the color darker (whilst still preserving some of the browness).

Step 4 - Increase Vignette

Step 4: Notice how the detail has come back. For this next step select the “Vignette” effect, and click on the color well, when the color picker comes up, click on the magnifying glass and then click on a light yellow area from the photo. This change the color of the Vignette to a more warmer color. To make the vignette more noticeable, drag the Radius slider towards to the left, not too much or you’ll lose the picture.

Step 5 - Matte

Step 5: Matte, click on the Matte effect and change the shape to “Old TV”, then increase the size giving the picture a nice fat border, use the color picker to choose one of the light yellow colors from the photo. Finally change the effect from None to “Blur”, this will give the Matte a nice soft edge.

Step 6 - Add Some Text

Step 6: Adding some text, click on the “Captions & text” effect, then click and drag the header down the list until it is below the matte and vignette effects. By default it will have created a new text, so type your message into the box, use the effect options to change the font and color. Next use the corners of the text box to position the box over the matte, notice as the box changes size and shape the text auto resizes to fit the box.

Step 7 - Print

Step 7: Print, Once your happy with your card, click on the “Print & Layouts” toolbar button. Your edited photo will then be transfered into the Print & Layouts interface. Scroll the icons at the bottom until you find the “Greeting Card”, then click it. All you need to do now is to click on Print, but before you do I have some tips.

1. Use a border-less page size in Page Layout (if your printer offers you that choice).
2. Use Portrait as the layout in the Page Setup Dialog
3. Use some nice photo card so the card will stand up by itself.

Tags: Tutorials

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2008 at 5:48 pm and is filed under All Articles, All Tutorials, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.