Monthly Archives: November 2011

This tutorial was created at the request of my neighbor and friend, with the beginning digital scrapbooker in mind. This tutorial will work best with a PNG file that is designed for you to drop your photo into it. I will be using a card from Becky Higgins’ site that is 5×7 and adjusting it to work with printing Custom Cards at Costco. The cards on Becky’s site are available in 4×6, 5×7, and the Costco Custom printing size of 6×7.5)

The first thing you want to do is create a new, blank canvas. The size of your canvas will depend on the size you will be printing. For this tutorial, I will use the Costco Custom Card size (which comes with envelopes)

To create a new canvas go to:
File> New

The following window will open and this is where you will enter you canvas size. When creating something that will be printed, you always want to enter 300dpi as the resolution. Since this is for the custom cards (that come with envelopes) at Costco, we will use their sizes (6×7.5 OR 7.5×6) (you can do other sizes as well though). Make sure inches is selected as the measurement in the dropdown box. Your window should look like this:

Now, you will have a blank canvas that looks like this, the checkerboard tells us that area is transparent:

Now, open your quick card by going to:
File> Open
and navigating to the location on your harddrive you saved your card.

The file will open in a new tab in Photoshop (that is the default setting). We need to change this so we can work with all of the windows; go to:
Window>Arrange> Float All Windows

Now, it will look something like this:

Select the window with the Christmas card in it by clicking on it. This will activate the layer and details for this window.

Now, we are going to grab the card and bring it over to the blank canvas that is sized for Costco printing. The red arrow in the image below shows where the Layers Stack is located (when a layer is selected, it is blue, just like below):

In the tools, we need to select the Move Tool. Here’s where the tools are:

The move tool is at the top and looks like this (click on it to select it):

Now, make sure that “Auto Select” option is NOT checked:

Hold down the shift key and click anywhere on the Christmas card, drag onto the new, blank canvas (while holding down the mouse button and the shift key), once on the new canvas, let go of the mouse button, then the shift key.

Holding down the shift key while moving things into a new canvas will make it so it’s automatically centered on the canvas. Your canvas should look something like this:

If for some reason, everything didn’t center and you want to try again, just go to:
Edit> Undo (or Ctrl+Z) and try it again.

Let’s be sure to save (saving often is your best friend ). Go to:
File>Save As
and navigate to where you want this file saved, it already has the name Costco Christmas Card, (if you added that in the beginning when you created the canvas).

Because of the design of this specific card, we need to move it to the top or the bottom of the canvas to make room for our photo (other cards might land exactly how they need to be).

To move the card, be sure the move tool is still selected, click on the card, drag it to the desired location and let go of the mouse (or use the arrow keys). Here’s what mine looks like (I left a little bit of a border):

Once the card is in place, we are ready for a photo. We need to open a photo by going to File>Open and navigating to the location that your photo is saved. Select the photo and click OPEN. Here’s what my screen looks like now:

We are now going to move the photo onto the card using similar steps as we did before. You can see in the screen above, my photo layer is selected because it is blue. Once that layer is selected, choose the move tool by click on it:

Hold down the shift key, click on the photo, drag into the window with the card, lift off the mouse button, let go of the shift key. Here’s what it looks like now, but don’t panic if yours doesn’t look exactly the same at this point (you just want to make sure that the photo is on the canvas with the Christmas card:

Let’s do ourselves a favor and save:Go to:
File>Save

The photo layer needs to go behind or below the card layer (so we can tuck part of the photo behind the card and ensure that they flow into each other instead of having a break).

With the photo layer selected (by clicking on it), we will drag that layer down and drop it in-between Layer 1 and Layer 2. This is how it will look when it’s ready to be dropped (notice the thick line between the two layers):

Here’s what my card looks like now:

You can see that the photo isn’t lined up that well, so we can move it by selecting the move tool again and making sure that the photo layer is still selected (highlighted in blue) in the Layers Stack. Then, move the photo into position.

NOTE: If you need to make your photo smaller to fit, you can do that by: holding down the shift key, clicking on one of the corner transform controls, and dragging toward the center, (see image below and see this post for more information on resizing in Photoshop, including a video). Holding down the shift key will make it so your aspect ratio of your photo stays the same (in other words, your family won’t look like they were in a funhouse mirror). After you are done resizing, hit enter to commit the changes or click on the check mark on the top menu bar:

Here’s what things are looking like now:

It’s that time again, save: Go to:
File>Save

Because we are making this card to print at Costco, we need to put something in the empty, transparent area (where the checkerboard is on your canvas). (If you are using a card that is sized to the exact size you will be printing, you will not need to add an additional color here).

In the Layers Stack, select the bottom layer:

In the Tools (on the left side of the screen, where the move tool is), select the Foreground Color by clicking on it:

That will open the Color Picker dialogue box like this:

When you put your mouse on the canvas or Christmas card, you will see it becomes an eyedropper. This is how we will match the color. I’m going to click on the red part of the greeting and match it.

Now, to fill that bottom layer with this color, we will select the Paint Bucket Tool (Note: if you don’t see the Paint Bucket, it might be hiding under the Gradient Tool, just click and hold the Gradient Tool until you see the Paint Bucket and then you can select it :

Gradient Tool:

With the Paint Bucket Tool selected and the bottom layer of the stack selected, just click on the transparent part of the canvas (where the checkerboard is) and the color you selected will fill that bottom layer. Here’s what my card looks like now:

Now, save again Go to:
File>Save

If you want to add some additional text, select the top layer in the stack:

Now, select the Text Tool:

You will want to create a text box by clicking in the upper left corner where you want to the type to start and dragging until the box is the size you want.

Just start typing. You can also change the font (in the top menu bar), spacing, sizing, etc. Once your done adding your text hit enter or the check mark to commit the change. You can then use the move tool to change the position of the text as you wish. Here’s what I have now:

Let’s save the layered PSD file one more time: Go to:
File>Save

Now, we need to save a jpeg so we can upload for printing. We do this by going to File> Save As. In the drop down File Type box, select JPEG:

Now, you are ready to upload to Costco for printing.