Friends and family will love receiving cards made from your photos.
Greeting cards made from your own photographs are much more personal than cards you can buy at a store. You can send an image that is meaningful to the individual recipients, and even add text that is specifically written for them. Today, photo greeting cards for ink jet printers come in several different paper textures, and you can get professional results with a little experimentation.
Instructions
Formatting Your Card
1. Choose a photo to use for your greeting card. Open the image in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, and adjust the tonality of your image to your satisfaction. You may want to crop it, change the colors or add some artistic filters to it.
2. Download the Microsoft Word greeting card template from the Strathmore site. Click on the second page in the template; this is the front of your card. Then go to the "Insert" menu and choose "Picture," then "From File." Navigate to your picture and click 'Insert." The picture will appear on the page.
3. Double-click the photo, and choose "Format Picture." When the dialogue box opens, choose "Layout" and then "Behind Text." (The text that was on the first page now appears in front of your picture; you will change it in Step 4.) You can move the picture now by simply mousing down on it and moving the cursor; you can also resize the picture by grabbing one of the blue dots and dragging.
4. Delete the text over the photo. Type your own text in the box, and choose any color and size in the "Font" dialogue box that shows up in the Formatting Palette in Word. Make sure you choose a color for your font that will show up on your photograph. You can re-size and move the text box around by clicking and dragging one of its edges.
5. Scroll down to the last page on the template. This is where you can add additional greetings or text for your card. You will print the front and the back of your card paper separately, so this message will print the second time you run the card through the printer.
Printing Your Card
6. Set your printer settings to match the card paper you are using, such as Gloss or Matte. Choose "File" then "Print Preview" to check the layout of your card, and delete any extraneous generic text that you don't want.
7. Take any normal paper out of the printer. Load only one of the greeting cards, unfolded. Make sure that your card is loaded in your printer so that the unfolded front and back of the card will be printed by the ink cartridges on this first pass. (Later you will turn the unfolded card over and print the inside.)
Slide the paper guide all the way over until it touches the edge of the paper, so that it will guide the paper through the printer correctly.
Choose Print. Select pages 1 and 2 to print.
8. Wait a few minutes for the front of your card to dry. Then insert the unfolded card back into the printer, with the other, unprinted side oriented so that it will be printed correctly. This time, when you choose print, choose pages 3 and 4 to print.
9. Continue to load and print the unfolded cards, one at a time, one side at a time.
