Creating a Baby Announcement
In December of 1999 my wife and I were blessed with a baby girl. This tutorial
walks through creating our custom baby announcement. Each announcement consisted
of a collage of five individual pictures blended into one another. The baby
announcement was created using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. The
announcement was printed at Kinkos. Note, the image you see to the right is
a reduced version of the announcement. In order to get a high quality print,
it is necessary to use 300dpi versus the 72dpi used on monitors. All measurements
listed in this tutorial reference the creation of the print version of the
announcement.
Prep Work
- Take Photo. I read at a number of places that B&W film is good
for baby photos since a baby's skin can often be blotchy and not look good in color.
Since I haven't shot B&W for years, I tested a number of B&W films. Eventually I
settled on Kodak 400CN. This is a 'pseudo' B&W film and can be processed and printed at any one
hour lab. I took most of the pictures I used for the announcement with my Nikon
50mm (ƒ1.4) lens. I took about 90 pictures of our daughter within three or four days of
when she was born. When you take your pictures, get in very close to the baby. Look for
good natural light coming in from windows and be very careful with depth of
field if you are using a 50mm set at a low aperture. All pictures were scanned to Kodak
Master PhotoCDs.
- Select Photo. In our case, I decided on a collage for our card layout.
This necessitated choosing images that complimented each other. For our collage
layout, I needed four landscape images and one portrait image for the center.
- Determine Announcement Size. We decided on a 5 ½ W x 4 ¼ H, non-opening
landscape announcement. This size announcement will fit into a an A-2 (5 ¾ W x 4 3/8 H)
envelope. See
'The making of our 1999 Christmas Card' if you would
like further information on all different sizes of envelopes that are available.
You can print four of these announcements on one piece of 8 ½ x 11 inch paper—which
makes the whole printing process pretty affordable.
Photoshop
- Create a Base Photoshop File. Go to File | New and create a file with the
following specifications:
Width 5 ½ (inches)
Height 4 ¼ (inches)
Resolution 300 (dpi)
-
Set Up Your Workspace.
Turn on rulers by going to View | Show Rulers. I
found that toggling units (File | Preferences | Units & Rulers) between inches and pixels
seemed to make things easier to center. Finally, create guides to show your borders (I used
½ inch all around) and center of image. Guides are non-printing, adjustable blue
(the default color) lines that you can create on your workspace to help you layout elements
symmetrically. To create a guide you click and drag from either the horizontal or vertical ruler.
Create seven guides—four that define your borders,two that define the center of your
announcement and divide the announcement up into four quadrants and a final guide to help you line
up the text at the bottom of your announcement.
- Individual images. Now you need to open the five individual pictures that will
make up the collage. You can determine the approximate size the picture needs to be by looking
at your quadrants created above. You will undoubtably need to resize and crop each image so that
that they will fit into base file. The following is the sizes of my images in pixels:
Center Image: 650W x 975H
Four Surrounding Images: 650W x 512H
For the center image, I had to use the 1024 x 1536 pixel scan from the Kodak PhotoCD. For the
surrounding four images I was able to get away with the 256 x 384 pixel scan. After you have gotten
the images sized correctly, you will probably need to do some minor clean-up. I generally increase
the contrast a bit (Image | Adjust | Brightness/Contrast) and apply the
Unsharp Mask (Filter | Sharpen | Unsharp Mask). I usually find it is
necessary to use the rubber stamp tool to clean up any residue left from the Unsharp Mask filter.
After each image is cleaned up, copy and paste it into your base file and move it into correct position.
-
Create Layer Masks.
Next it is necessary to create layer masks so that the images blend
seamlessly with each other. For the center image I used the circle marquee tool with a 75 pixel
feather. For the four surrounding images I used the rectangle marquee with a 50 pixel feather.
I selected about 75 pixels from the border of the relevant picture. In each case, after I
perfected the selection, I went to Layer | Add Layer Mask | Hide All and
then deleted out the center of the mask. After doing all five layer masks, I cleaned up any layer
mask problems with the Airbrush tool. As Shannia Twain would say... "cool".
- Add Text. I added text to the card using the following fonts:
Top Text: Book Antiqua 18 point Faux Bold
Bottom Text: Book Antiqua 10 point Faux Bold
Afterwards, I tried using some fancy new Photoshop 5.5 features and used Layer | Effects |
Bevel & Emboss on all fonts (used defaults).
- Save. Hopefully you have been doing this all along, but if not, now is definitely a good time
to save your image. You have now created your card. We will now use Adobe Illustrator to replicate
the image four times and layout the card on a 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper.
Illustrator
- Setup Illustrator. Start Illustrator & show rulers (View | Show Rulers).
Change the layout of your workspace to landscape. Do this under File | Document Setup. There are two
places to change the layout to landscape... once in the main document setup dialog (labeled 'orientation')
and again in the dialog that comes up when you press the 'Print Setup' button. Finally, divide your workspace
into four quadrants using guides (Illustrator guides are created in the same way as Photoshop's are).
-
Import Images Created in Photoshop. Import your announcement image created in Photoshop
above by using the File | Place command. Make sure the 'link' checkbox is
checked. When the Photoshop image shows up in Illustrator, move it into one of the four quadrants.
Copy the image three more times and move each of the copies into the appropriate quadrant.
- Print. Test print your image on a local printer. My announcement layout printed surprisingly
well on my HP Laserjet IV. After you are satisfied with your test print, load your Illustrator and
Photoshop files onto a zip disk or other media and head off to Kinkos. We printed our announcements on
non-glossy 8 ½ x 11 inch card stock and then had Kinkos cut each 8 ½ x 11 into four individual
announcements.
|
