Hi all,
I am trying to set up my 16 year old great-niece, who I have been mentoring in photography for several years, with a work flow to produce her own greeting cards from her stock photography. A friend at church, who is an artist, started out by making paintings of "faceless' angels. This led to creating prints and eventually greeting cards. They were kind enough to share some tips as to how they got started. At one time they had 4 Canon printers going to make her own greeting cards and eventually wore out the print heads. Now they have them made through a commercial offset printer. Here is the website if you are interested:
www.myangelfriends.com
What I have started with is an 8.5 X 11 inch paper that I formatted in Photoshop to print two 5.5 X 8.5 images that each fold in half to make a 4.25 X 5.5 inch card. Note my learning curve that shows white at the top of the green leaf card as well as some skinny white borders on others (before I learned to check the 'borderless' box in the printer setup). I tried Office Depot's glossy finish 9 mil paper as it has no maker's logo on the back (which becomes the inside of the folded card). Unfortunately, the surface is a bit slick and while I eventually found a marking pen that can be used to write a message, I would prefer to have a paper than can be written on with a common ball-point pen.
I then moved to an Avery card stock, #8577, that has a matte finish and is scored to make four 4.25 X 5.5 cards. I printed a 'duo' of cards as before and split the sheet in half making two separate cards. Since the stock is scored, it was much easier to fold than with the 9 mil glossy print paper. I would imagine though that too many openings and closing may eventually cause the card to separate at the fold as the paper is designed to be cut into 4 cards.
The matte paper doesn't give the quality of a glossy finish and not all of my great-niece's photos look as good on the matte stock. The butterfly image at the far left is on the matte card stock. I have included the commercially produced "angel" card from my friend for comparison as to size. I'd appreciate any suggestions/recommendations you may have. Here are a couple of images to show what I have been working on.
The "Angel" card is in front to show size comparison with the commercially produced card.
The card flat on the table is a draft printed on plain paper. The two "blue" images partially cut off to the right are on the matte stock as is "butterfly" far left and front. All the rest are on glossy paper