Merry Christmas-1998!
Last Christmas, Amy told me I should try and make a our own Christmas card. It sounded like a good idea, so I started plugging away at the project. Little did I know what I was getting into. The whole process was so complicated, that I started to write down notes so that I hopefully wouldn’t make the same mistakes next year. What you are reading now is a “web-ized” version of those notes.

The Picture
Pictures in general are relatively easy to take. Quality pictures that include both Amy & I, are a little harder to come by.  Fortunately, we got lucky and took a semi-decent shot during our summer boat trip. The picture above was taken in Princess Royal Channel in North British Columbia on 7/6/98. The camera was loaded with Kodak Royal Gold 100 and was precariously balanced on a pile of sweatshirts. I used the camera’s self timer and a 20mm lens. After the print was developed, I had Pacific Color (Greenlake, WA) scan the image onto Kodak PhotoCD. Kodak PhotoCD gives you 5 resolutions of the same image.

    128 x 192 pixels
    256 x 384 pixels
    512 x 768 pixels
    1024 x 1536 pixels
    2048 x 3072 pixels

Photoshop
I normally use the 256 x 384 or 512 x 768 pixel images for most of my web pages. But nooooo! As I learned the hard way, these resolution images are not nearly good enough for printing. A computer screen displays at 72 dots per inch (dpi) while quality printing is done at a minimum of 300 dpi, oftentimes more. Bottom line, this means that to get a puny 4 x 5 inch print (suitable say for a Christmas card) you need to use the 1024 x 1536 or 2048 x 3072 pixel scans. Holy sheeit – these files are not small! Our PC is only a P133 and we have no zip drive. Working with big images like this on a three year old laptop is a bit of a joke!. Anyway, after a lot of trial and error (mostly error), I finally ended up settling on a Photoshop file with the following properties:

The above specifications make for a nice sized (~5 x 7 inches, after folding in half) Christmas card. Using 400 - 600dpi would probably be preferable, but the file sizes just got unworkable (>20megs). After I created the base file, I pasted in the 1024 x 1536 version of the image from the Kodak PhotoCD. I cropped then slightly enlarged the image to make it fit right. I did a bunch of typical “cleanup” type procedures (unsharp mask + some limited burning and dodging). After this, I used a layer mask to blur out the edges.  I cleaned up some of the white on top of the trees so that it was a “pure-white” and blended nicely into the card. Finally, I used a 80 point font for the “M” in Merry Christmas, a 40 point font for the “erry Christmas” and a 20 point font for the red text on the right. The font on the back of the card is 10 or 12 point (this is not visible in the GIF version above). All fonts were bolded. The font is called Poetica Chancery. After I got the card all tweaked up, I went into page setup and turned on the check box that says “corner crop marks”. This helped cut the cards down to size.

Next I test printed the card several times on our HP LaserJet 4. Unfortunately we don’t have a color printer, but this gave me a rough idea how the card was looking.

How Kinkos Became My Second Home for the Holidays
After all this work, I though it was finally time for the really fun stuff... printing in color! Hahahahahaha... .The first problem to figure out, was how to physically get my file to Kinkos for color output. At first this was easy because my image was only at 72dpi and thus the file would fit on a floppy. Too bad it looked like crap. Chalk up trip #1 to Kinkos.

Once I upped my dpi to 300, the file size ballooned to over 10 megs - far too big for a floppy. I talked to the nice, but “not-terribly-knowledgeable” clerk at Kinkos and he said, “No problem man. Just email me the file”. I spent about 5 hours one night trying to email the file to my newfound friend at Kinkos. After immense frustration, I finally concluded that my ISP wont allow me to email files greater than one meg. By win-zipping and flattening the image (i.e. removing the layers in Photoshop), I was able to get it down to a mere 3.7 megs - still far to big for a floppy, still too big to email. I tried getting access to Kinkos FTP site, but that proved to be a bit of an administrative nightmare. Chalk up another trip to Kinkos. Finally I just ended up FTP-ing the zipped file up on to my web site. I was then able to copy it down at Kinkos using a browser on one of their PCs. Wallah! Kinkos PCs have both Photoshop 4 and Microsoft Explorer installed. Thank God.

I did a few test prints on Kinkos cheaper Tektronics color printer and then finally sent the print job off to the big color copier/printer. We printed the cards on what Kinkos terms "glossy card stock". It took a few tries to get this right, but finally I had a proof to show Amy. After we decided we liked the final result, I went back to Kinkos the next day to have them print off all the cards. Too bad–the power is out! I come back the next day. Sorry–the color copier/printer is down. Whatever. Finally, I come down the next day and all systems were go. In case you’ve lost track, this was my sixth or seventh trip to Kinkos. I ask them to cut the cards down to size (per the crop marks) and then fold them. Costwise, the cutting and folding is very reasonable. Anyway, I come back the next day, and the cards are finally done. I am in a hypercritical mood, and am not 100% pleased with the folding job, but decide that if I make another scene, a Kinkos employee might go postal. Later that day, I buy green 5¼ x 7¼ envelopes from the Paper Zone (great place), and we are finally at the point where most people start with their Christmas cards.

The Moral of the Story
I guess you could say that this was a fun project. There were moments of fun interlaced with plenty of frustration. Next year, I hope to have more capable hardware - a color printer to do test prints, a zip drive, a more powerful processor, more RAM and a bigger, high resolution screen. This would help a lot. I do have plenty of ideas for improvements that should be noted for the record:

• Try doing the card at 400 - 600dpi.
• Try FTP-ing and printing the card at a local pro-Photo Lab. I know ProLab (one of our local professional labs - Freemont WA) has a color printer that might output higher quality prints than Kinkos was capable of. I know one downside to this is cost and the fact their printer cant print on very heavy card stock. A good workaround might be to try outputting an original on ProLab’s printer and then color-copying from that master at Kinkos onto card stock.
• Lastly, manipulate the images in Photoshop, but then do the card layout in Adobe Illustrator. I don’t think Kinkos’ machines have Illustrator, so one would probably have to save the file as some sort of postscript file. I'm note sure if this would work.

While doing our card, I came to a realization. Digital photography is great, but printing digitized images is a whole different ball game. I think about the new digital “mega-pixel” camera’s that are now becoming popular. I now realize these cameras must be next to useless if you are planning on printing a decent quality print. I had heard this many times, but now I guess I really understand it. I am sure that 5 years from now, I will re-read this web page and laugh as I am shooting and printing pictures with my Nikon “giga-pixel” camera.

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