With the holidays approaching it is still not too late to take on a
project and do your own holiday card. All you really need is an image
for the cover, some paper to print on (or a service to send to),
Photoshop <http://www.aps8.com/pscs3.html> (or Elements
<http://www.aps8.com/elements6.html> ), and a plan for the layout. The
plan mostly has to do with printing to the edge, and getting the image
on the front of the card.
[cards-finished.png]


Printing to the Edge
A layout problem that may confound those making their first cards is
printing to the edge of the paper. Though some home printers have a
print-to-the-edge feature, there is an edge area of the sheets you are
printing that the printer will not print on -- commonly called a grip
edge. It is often a quarter to a half an inch broad, and may vary from
edge to edge depending on how paper was designed to go through the
printer. The solutions to the problem of printing to the edge (and this
holds for when you send a job to a shop to have it printed), is to
design a little larger and then and crop the paper to the size you want
the finished piece. So, for your holiday card, you wouldn't start
with paper that was exactly the right size and then use your printer to
print the image exactly to the edge; you'd start with a larger
sheet, print the layout, and then trim the paper down. To make your
layout work, you'd lay out the graphic part of the card to print a bit
beyond the crop edge—say, by an eighth of an inch (which is a
printing standard). This is known as a bleed. The bleed provides a
margin of error for the cropping. If the cut doesn't fall precisely
on the crop mark, the image will still come all the way to the edge of
the cropped area.
[cards-layout.png]
The Basic Layout

Image on the Front
In laying out the card, be sure to think of how you want it to present!
When you use a folded card, you have to put the front of the card on the
right side of the layout so that when it folds the front of the card is
in the right place. It may not be natural to think of the right side of
the layout as the front, but that is where it is! The back of the card
is on the left.
[cards-outside.png]
Outside

On the inside, the left and right facing sides are more intuitive. You
usually want to have the saying on the right.
[cards-inside.png]
Inside

As far as the back of the card, you can put several things there for
information purposes. Sometimes it is fun to put in your real or even an
imaginary business name, copyright and date, website (if appropriate),
and maybe some information about the photo (subject, title, separate
copyright -- if applicable). Usually this is all in small type so as not
to detract from the card. Homemade cards seem to always be the ones that
stand out from the others.

For More Information...
For better ways to process your images and get the most out of them for
your cards and other uses, be sure to check out Richard Lynch's
Photoshop courses <http://photoshopcs.com/photoshop_courses.htm> and
his latest book: The Adobe Photoshop Layers Book
<http://aps8.com/taplb.html>

Holiday Gift Ideas
If you are looking for a good gift for that budding photographer or
photoshop professional, try giving a betterphoto.com gift card
<http://www.betterphoto.com/gifts.asp> . Good for courses, books and
apparel!



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