Merry Christmas — 1999!
In 1998 I made our first custom Christmas Card. That effort was an exercise in frustration. During '98, I copiously took notes on the whole process, hoping to make the 1999 effort less exhausting. This year’s card was surely easier, but still had its own set of challenges. I took some of my own advice and used Adobe Illustrator for card layout while still using Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the actual image. What follows is a step by step description of how we made our 1999 Christmas Card.

The Picture
For this year’s card, we had five photo candidates—all taken by other people, using my camera. Amy & I narrowed the pictures down to the one you see in the photo to the right. The picture was taken at Whitesand Cove, Clayoquot Sound. Clayoquot Sound is on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, in British Columbia. My sister Wendy took the picture on August 6, 1999. The Nikon was loaded with my favorite standby film, Kodak Royal Gold 100 and I am pretty sure the shot was taken with the faithful 20mm, f2.8 lens. The day was so foggy, we couldn’t see the Patience at anchor about ¼ mile offshore. The image was converted from analog to digital using the Kodak PhotoCD process. As in 1998, the scan was done by Pacific Color (Greenlake,WA). While I didn’t use them in this case, I have used Kodak’s own in-house film processing service to create PhotoCD’s in the past. Kodak’s service is the most economical I have found, but very slow. The quality of their scans seems to be quite good.

Adobe Photoshop
I learned the hard lesson last year that it is necessary to use the big PhotoCD scans when you are planning on printing your image (versus putting it on the web). With this in mind, I started by experimenting on our chosen image using a smaller (lower-res) and more manageable version (512 x 768) to try and determine what changes I was going to make to the big image. When you have a wimpy PC like I do, planning out your edits on a smaller-res version of your image can make the process less frustrating.
Finally, I have a plan for what edits will need to be made. I open a base Photoshop file with the properties shown in the image to the right. The H-2250 x W-1575 pixel dimensions convert to a H-7.5 x W-5.25 inch image at 300dpi. I chose these dimensions because I am planning on making a 5 x 7 inch portrait oriented card (10 x 7 inches folded in half). This year, I wanted my image to run right to the edge of the card, so I needed some overlap (referred to as "bleed" in the publishing business)... thus the rationale for an image slightly bigger than the planned card. See the section titled Adobe Illustrator below for a jpeg of what the whole card looked like when layed-out in Illustrator.
A 5 x 7 card fits nicely into an A-7 envelope. For the last two years, I have purchased our envelopes at a store in Seattle called the "Paper Zone". They have an excellent selection of papers and envelopes at reasonable prices. The lady at our nearby Paper Zone was kind enough to give me a flyer which explained all the different sized envelopes that are theoretically available. I say theoretically because not all manufacturers make all envelope styles in all sizes. Below is a table of envelope sizes:

	Envelope Name	Dimensions
	4 Bar	3 5/8 x 5 1/8
	5 Bar	4 1/8 x 5 5 5/8
	A-2 or 5 1/2 Bar	4 3/8 x 5 3/4
	A-6 or 6 Bar	4 3/4 x 6 1/2
	A-7 or Lee	5 1/4 x 7 1/4
	A-8	5 1/2 x 8 1/8
	Leader Laser	5 3/4 x 8 7/8

After I create my base Photoshop file, I open the 2048 x 3072 pixel scan of our picture. Our PC is so overwhelmed by this task, I have time to go grab a cup of coffee while it tries to open the big image. When I come back with my coffee, the 2048 x 3072 image is finally open. I crop the image and then resize it so that it fits nicely onto my 1575 x 2250 base file. I copy the image onto my base file and the start making the edits I had carefully planned out on my low-res version of the picture:

• Fade foggy sky to pure-white. I like when a foggy sky fades into pure-paper white. To do this, I select the cloudy sky using the Magic Wand tool. I clean up the selection a bit using the Lasso tool and then Feather the selection 25 pixels. After feathering I delete any remaining color. I clean up any unwanted residue with the good old Rubber Stamp Tool.
  
  
• Recolor Amy’s Pategonia to Red/Orange. Amy is unhappy because she is wearing the same yellow Pategonia she had on for last year’s Christmas card. I laboriously select her Pategonia using Pen tool. I create a new layer and then turn the path into a selection. I paint the selection in the new layer red using the Airbrush. After reducing the opacity for my new layer, I end up with kind of an orange/red color. I later wish I had done this a different way so that I ended up with more of a pure red.
  
  
• Apply Unsharp Mask Filter. Lastly I apply the Unsharp Mask Filter. This is a wonderful filter that sharpens up the picture. I play with the Amount and Threshold settings until I get the effect I want. After applying the Unsharp Mask filter, you always want to go back and look for unwanted residue (they look like waterspots) from the filter. It is best to look at the image at actual size. Eliminate residue using the Rubber Stamp tool.