Doug Kerr
Well-known member
Introduction
Inspired by Rob Watcher’s wonderful description of his own project to produce photo-based greeting cards, and encouraged by Asher Kelman, we have begun a project to generate greeting cards here based on my photos of Carla’s paintings. (She works in acrylics, mostly on canvas.)
At least for the moment, the plan is not to produce those for sale (although that might come in a later stage). Rather, these cards will be for our personal use.
We no longer make a mass mailing of cards at Christmas. But Carla does send cards to selected family members and friends, and from time to time she will send a note on a card to someone thanking them for some kindness or congratulating them on some accomplishment.
Our plan was to use that most-common card size for this kind of project. This uses 7” x 10” paper, folded to make a 5” x 7” card (which can be of either orientation, depending on the aspect ratio of the photo on the front).
The cards will be printed on our new Canon Pixma G3270 inkjet printer. This is a “one step above entry level” four-color tank-type printer. It is not usually advocated for high-quality photo printing, but we have been amazed at how well it does at that.
The “standard” card format will have the photo on the front outside, with a description of the original painting and identification of the artist on the back outside.
The workflow involves two Windows applications. The text “block” for the back is composed in CorelDraw, our normal technical illustration program (vector-style). The text block is then exported as a high-resolution PNG file.
The entire card is then laid out from that image file plus the image file for the photo in Qimage Ultimate, our usual photo printing application. This is a little tricky, since Qimage Ultimate is very “clever” in helping us to size and orient the images to be printed. But I have developed a relatively “foolproof” procedure, which extensive testing has shown to work consistently well.
The printing is then conducted by Qimage Ultimate on the G3270 printer.
One issue was the choice of the paper stock to be used. I will cover that in the next message.
Best regards,
Doug
Inspired by Rob Watcher’s wonderful description of his own project to produce photo-based greeting cards, and encouraged by Asher Kelman, we have begun a project to generate greeting cards here based on my photos of Carla’s paintings. (She works in acrylics, mostly on canvas.)
At least for the moment, the plan is not to produce those for sale (although that might come in a later stage). Rather, these cards will be for our personal use.
We no longer make a mass mailing of cards at Christmas. But Carla does send cards to selected family members and friends, and from time to time she will send a note on a card to someone thanking them for some kindness or congratulating them on some accomplishment.
Our plan was to use that most-common card size for this kind of project. This uses 7” x 10” paper, folded to make a 5” x 7” card (which can be of either orientation, depending on the aspect ratio of the photo on the front).
The cards will be printed on our new Canon Pixma G3270 inkjet printer. This is a “one step above entry level” four-color tank-type printer. It is not usually advocated for high-quality photo printing, but we have been amazed at how well it does at that.
The “standard” card format will have the photo on the front outside, with a description of the original painting and identification of the artist on the back outside.
The workflow involves two Windows applications. The text “block” for the back is composed in CorelDraw, our normal technical illustration program (vector-style). The text block is then exported as a high-resolution PNG file.
The entire card is then laid out from that image file plus the image file for the photo in Qimage Ultimate, our usual photo printing application. This is a little tricky, since Qimage Ultimate is very “clever” in helping us to size and orient the images to be printed. But I have developed a relatively “foolproof” procedure, which extensive testing has shown to work consistently well.
The printing is then conducted by Qimage Ultimate on the G3270 printer.
One issue was the choice of the paper stock to be used. I will cover that in the next message.
Best regards,
Doug
