CREATING CARDS FOR SPECIAL OCCASIONS
by Stephen R. Brown

You can make quantities of your own personalized holiday cards quickly and cheaply if your local lab is equipped with one of the new breed of Fuji Frontier or Kodak digital printers. Using any image editing program, you can add type and quickly create quantities of your own custom cards. It's much faster and cheaper than a home desktop printer. If you don't routinely shoot digital, these digital hybrid machines will scan your film and burn it to a CD so you can begin creating the cards. It's about $7.00 for CD.

You only need make your cards to "standard" 3.5x5 or 4x6 dimensions to take advantage of these machines. There's no ink or paper to buy and no waiting for your inkjet printer. Simply drop a CD full of digitized images at the mini-lab and return in an hour. The prints are also archival, a quality that only a few home desktop printers can claim. Better yet, you can perfectly control the color of your image as it's WYSWYG(What You See is What You Get)! The price for a 4x6 print is normally about $0.60 but I have found that I can negotiate quantities down to about $0.30 per print. Not only is this a considerable savings over traditional greeting cards but it's a chance to get a personal message across. The process is relatively simple. First, make a new blank file in one of the standard mini-lab sizes. The image must be 300 dpi resolution for a quality print. Then, open up your finished image, add type and size it(300 dpi) to approximately l/4 inch less than the standard print size.

Drag or copy the image into the template and move it around until it is centered, flatten the layers and save it in "jpeg" format at highest quality.

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Burn the images to CD and you've got your cards in an hour. I have to confess that I have gone nuts with this process and am using it for portfolios, business cards and sundry promotional needs.

I now have my images made up at 4x6 inches and have them bound by Kinko's. I also make my business cards using the "wallet" format . It's so easy to create these cards that I have made up ten different cards and have them printed in quantities of ten. So when I offer you a card, you get a chance to look at my portfolio. I can assure you it quickly draws a crowd and I inevitably end up giving away several.

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