Red Row Studio

I’ve been using this trick for ages to make simple cards from photograph – starting with a photo and making a card like looks like this:

Once you know how you can make a card very quickly, and it’s certainly quicker than rushing out to the shops when you need a card in a hurry.  Here’s how to do it.

1. Open your photo in GIMP and crop it to the correct ratio.  I like square cards, and I have a bunch of square envelopes, so here’s my starting image:

2. Double the width of the image, to allow for folding the card in half. Go to Image -> Canvas size, then click on the lock icon to unlink width and height.  Change the drop down box to percent, and type 200 in the width box.  Finally, drag the photo over to the right hand side in the box below, and select All Layers from the Resize Layers drop down box. It should look like this before you click resize:

and after, your image should look like this:

The white half of the image will be the back of your card, so if you want anything on the back (I sometimes add the title of the photo) add it now (or do it by hand after you’ve made the card!)

If you want a card that hinges on the top rather than the side (which is sometimes better for wider photos) then change the Height to 200 instead of the Width, and drag the image to the bottom of the box.  If you do this, then your printed image in step 4 will be twice the height of your final card, but the same width.

3. Add a border. A thin black border all the way around the card will show you exactly where to cut and make sure that the back and front of the card are the same size.  Go to Filters -> Decor -> Add Border.  Set the X and Y size to 5 and the colour to black.  Set the Delta Value on Colour to 1.  It should look like this before you click OK:

And after clicking OK, your image will look like this (actually the border will probably not be this wide):

4. Print and cut out. Hopefully it’s now obvious what the next stage is!  Print out the image (remember that the it will be twice the width of the finished card), cut along the black border, then score along the middle line and fold in half.

Tags: Howto

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 3:16 am and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.