Photo Gift Tags: Tutorial

Before the tutorial, I just wanted to say I’m sorry for the lack of responding to your comments lately!  But I wanted to thank you for them, and especially for the Anniversary wishes and Hawaii recommendations.  Thank you!!!  I also wanted to point out that although I loved my background, it’s now gone and it loads and scrolls SO MUCH BETTER, at least in Internet Explorer.  So yay for a faster blog!

You saw these photo gift tags on THIS post yesterday.  Today I’m going to show you how you can make them because they are cute, easy, and when you are in a neighborhood with another family that shares the same last name, a picture helps so we don’t have to sign our entire first names.

Just to make sure you know, this method isn’t 100% perfect.  It seems that between using Picnik and then sending them off to get printed, sometimes a bit gets cut off the sides or top or bottom, but it will still get you really good results with these simple tips. 

Now you might think that you could just print wallet sizes and save you some time.  That’s very true, but with 4 x 6 prices being less than half the price of most wallets, this is a good time investment, and it goes quickly.  This tutorial is specifically for pictures that were taken horizontally, but it would be so easy to do it the other way—just crop the opposite way and you should be fine!

First, upload a favorite picture to Picnik.  My sister took this cute one of my kids.  I do realize B isn’t the most lady-like in it, but it makes me smile…and oh those beautiful brown eyes! 

Edit how you would like.

I like to use the winterize button under the “seasonal” tab.

Next, crop your picture.  Notice that I set the crop to “no constraints” and changed the actual size to 1600 x 1200, marking scale photo before doing that.  That’s so that you can crop it the right size to fit two pictures on a 4 x 6 photo.

Under the “seasonal” tab, I also chose to add some snowflakes.

I added the text. And as a side note, if you want to perfectly match the colors in picnik, you click on the shape or text with the color you want, then double click those numbers and letters in the upper right corner of the “sticker properties” box.  Then right click and copy.

Next, click on the text or shape you want to change to that color.  Double click on the numbers and letters in the upper right hand corner, then right click and paste what you copied in the above step.  Sometimes it takes it couple tries to work for some reason, but it does work! 

So now my text and snowflakes all match.  **Please note two things here:  First, I wish I had moved my text and snowflakes down a bit at the top.  When you print them off, sometimes they get cropped just a little bit more than you think and can get really close to the text.  So you might as well be safe and leave a little more room than I did!  Second, that cursive font under Merry Christmas is too hard to read, so if you have something that small, perhaps use a more readable font.  I saved my picture at this point to use as larger Christmas cards to mail if I run out of my Shutterfly cards.

Next I rotated the picture and saved it again so it would be in my picnik history.

Now click on Home and then Collage.

 

At the bottom where it says Photo Basket, click on the drop-down menu and choose History.  Also, click on the collage that has just two rectangles as shown.  You could certainly try and figure out the 3 rectangles, but it would crop out more of your picture.

Change the spacing so it’s set at zero. 

Add your sideways picture to both rectangles.  I found that to keep the picture true to what I wanted it to look like without the collage cropping it at all, I had to slide the proportions bit to 43:57, NOT 40:60 like you would think.  It doesn’t seem to make sense, but when I put it to 40:60, and tried to print that on Walmart, it was really messed up and cropped a lot out that I didn’t want it to.  The 43:57 got the best printed 4×6 results.  Also make sure you change the quality to High in the upper right hand corner.

Now save your picture.  You can see that I tried it twice and both times I had the dimensions set at 2400 width, but the height was just a little different on both.  Next time I might experiment and change the 2400 (such as 2395) to be just a little bit smaller to see if that helps at all once I send it to be printed.  I honestly don’t know if that would make a difference, but I think it might.  Now save the photo tags.

I just had mine printed this time at Walmart.  Make sure to check how it is going to print and adjust it how you need to so things aren’t cropped out that you don’t want to be.  You can see here that my words are right at the top, which is why I suggest moving the words down a bit to give you a little more room, because it did cut them off just a tiny bit on the right-hand picture.  AND, do not rotate your picture!  At least not in Walmart’s.  It really messed with the cropping!

And now even if you use the one hour photo, you just made two photo tags for .19 cents.  And now you can show off your cute family on all your gifts without the cost of a Christmas card!

And just because our sunset was beautiful last night…  Straight outta the camera (except cropping out my neighbors shed that kinda blocks our view now).