Adding a photo to a greeting card template in Photoshop CS2

[OldBoy]

Originally Posted by AnneBennett

Hi OldBoy
Do I take it that the image you showed was the whole of the image? I did have my image upside down and placed on the left hand side of the page. When I checked in print preview it appeared to take up 2/3 of the page. I tried several ways to place the card in the printer in landscape position and I also tried in portrait position to see if it made any difference. Each time it would only print out part of the image.
Many thanks for your continued help

This could be down to a memory problem with your printer, because when you process a file into printer language, a 1mb file could require almost 4mb to process before printing. Try reducing the size of the file and try again.

The way I setup the example above would print as normal, i.e. portrait mode, and when printed you would fold the page in half, which would make the picture appear correctly on the card.

Try downloading this program FinePrint from: http://www.fineprint.com/products/fineprint/index.html It's free for testing print layout and we use to use it on the Xerox 2060 colour laser printer, a commerical printer that cost around £250,000.

[AnneBennett]

Thanks OldBoy
I'll have a look at the link you have posted and have another go, I am not going to give up. What puzzles me is that I have made one once!
Regards
Ps
Have just had a look at fineprint and it looks a good idea

[Eyeayen]

Anne, if you've made a screen grab, paste it into a new window in Photoshop and then save as a Jpeg.

Open an account with ( for example ) http://photobucket.com/

And then upload your saved file onto that site.

You should then see something like this...



If you copy the link in the area I've put the green box around you will have an address, copy and paste that address into your post on here ( is should have [IMG] tags around it - look up posting images on the forum here ), that way you can if you wish upload screen grabs of what's happening.

What OldBoy has said should cover you.

Have you started from scratch ? Making a new document and then placing your image into it ?

[AnneBennett]

Thanks Eyeayen & apologies for the tardy reply. I have used Photobucket before in the way you have suggested but not for a while, thanks for the tips. I have had a bit of time today and started from scratch with one of my original tutorials as it did work once, started with a new document with correct measurements it looked ok on print preview, but printed out small again. I will scan the cards I have tried with and upload as you suggested and make the link so you are able to see what has happened. I have several samples on one card as I was trying not to waste too many. I have tried inserting the card in landscape into printer and portrait, just to see what happened. I downloaded the free fineprint and tried with that today it does come with their logo attached until you purchase the full product. You can see the same happened with fineprint. I will see if I have the time to leave a link tomorrow
Thanks

[AnneBennett]

Hi to All
I have a series of screen prints I have done on my attempt to try to make cards today. First of all I made sure that I set my printer correctly.







I started the way OldBoy suggested but my image was still too big even though I had resized, you can see this in the first link. The second link was so that you could see what I had been doing. The third link was so that you could see when I tried to resize the image. I changed the image size to A& if I insert a width of 105mm the height automatically selects 157.19mm. I thought there must be a way of manually putting the sizes and found that when I unticked the constraints box it then let me put in what resolution I needed, then the resolution changed to 646.37 is this ok?

I did have a quick look at Serif PagePlus and a similar thing happened there??

I hope you might be able to get an idea of what is happening with the screen prints?
Thanks and regards

[OldBoy]

Can't quite see from the screen shots, as they are too small.

[AnneBennett]

I thought that might be the case I have them saved as pdf files which you can see, but of course you can't upload here??
thanks

[MattUK]

Sorry, I might have come in a little late, but 600+ dpi is fine for printing.

Is the problem that your image is getting distorted as you try and fit it to the page?

[AnneBennett]

The image doesn't distort, I just can't seem to fit it to the page and I have tried several methods. At times it has been too large or not in the right place on printing. I have done it once but can't remember how. Thanks for letting me know about dpi.

[MattUK]

OK - when you say you can't get it to fit, what do you mean exactly?

For info, the process should be this:

Create a new image. Set the DPI / resolution to be 300dpi (or 600 if you have a printer that can print that high, and the images you want to print are very large), and a document width and height the dimensions of your card. You can set this by changing the drop down menu from pixels to mm or cm if it isn't already. Click OK. This should now have created a blank document, in the exact dimensions of the card once it is physically printed.

Now open your image file. Use the largest version of the file you have. Using the Move tool, drag your image onto your blank document image.

Now, if your image once you've dragged it across appears much smaller than your blank document (half the size or less), then you might want to consider starting again, and using a smaller resolution (if you had it at 600, go to 300, or if you had it at 300, go to 150). Then repeat the above process.

If your image appears massive, and doesn't fit on the blank document, then we're in a good place.

Select the Marquee tool (the dotted line box), ensure your photo layer is selected in the Layer palette, and right click on it. Choose Free Transform. Now Zoom out of the document by pressing Ctrl + the minus key (or Option + the minus key if you have a Mac).

You'll see your document zoom out, and the box around your photo sitting on top of it. Now make sure the top left corner of the photo is sitting in the top left corner of the blank document. Hold down the shift key, and drag the bottom right corner of the photo inwards. you should see your photo reduce in size. Keep doing this until either the width of the photo matches the width of the blank doc, or the height matches the height of the blank doc (whichever comes first). Double click inside the box surrounding the photo to accept the transformation.

If your image is now cropped on either the horizontal or vertical, you can use the Move tool to move it around to get the best crop.

I hope this helps