Want to use those digital photos as postcards?  A few simple Photoshop tricks ensures your results are predictable.

I had a problem.  I wanted a digital picture, surrounded by a frame of white, with text under the bottom of the picture - a copyright, picture title, and my site URL.  Sounds easy enough, right?

Wrong.  For me anyway.

Turns out digital pictures are a different shape than 4x6 prints - getting reliable results took a few attempts.  I’m hoping to save others the frustration I went through, so here’s a quick tutorial:

I used Photoshop Elements for editing.  Here’s the process:

Image Editing
- Open the digital picture in Photoshop.  The picture will be on the background layer.

- Create a new layer.

- Go back to the background, and select the entire image and cut it to the clipboard.

- Paste it into the new layer. 

- Size the image down a bit, holding down the shift key to constrain the proportions.

- Create another new layer.

- On the new layer, draw a rectangle.  Make it an obnoxious color like bright red.

- Size the rectangle to 4” x 6” using the “info” window.

- Place it at the top-left of the entire image.

- Again holding down the shift key to keep the same proportions, drag the red rectangle, sizing it to be as large as possible until the right side matches the image right side.

- Send the red rectangle to the back, so your image is on top of it.

- The red rectangle is now your rough “print safe” zone - the space below it will be cropped off by the picture printer.

- Size your image now, leaving a healthy border of red around it.  For me, on a 2MP image, a border of roughly .9” worked well.

- Add any text, still keeping within the red rectangle.  A 22 Point font in Photoshop printed out at about 1/8” high on a 4x6 print.

- Here’s roughly what you should have (note that what shows as gray below should really be white - I had to recolor it or it wouldn’t show on this page):

- Once all your editing is done, just hide the red rectangle layer before you save the Photoshop file as a JPG.

Printing
- Once you’re at the photo printer, you will need to figure out how to edit what it’s going to print.  I’ve used 2 machines, and the software was different (of course).  The machine at the local Meijer store was easy enough to figure out - there was an edit mode, then a crop and zoom option.  What it didn’t have was a good way of indicating that it had saved your changes, and going back to a previously edited image seemed to reset everything.  I got 4 out of 5 right.  The machine at Walgreens was much better.  Once you changed the crop and zoom settings, it inserted an “edited picture” into your list of pictures, so it was obvious which ones you had done.

- At any rate, zoom out as far as possible, and move the crop zone so that it starts in the upper left corner of the image.

- Print the images.

-Your prints should come out with roughly 1/8” border of white around the top, left and bottom of the picture, with about 1” of white along the right side.

- You’ll want to cut off the excess.  The scrapbooking craze has made little photocroppers easy to get.

I must admit, they look pretty sharp when finally done.  The true test will be to see if I see them hanging on any of the recipient’s cube walls.

I guess since I didn’t get any Christmas cards out, now’s as good of time as any to get cracking on them…

Update:
The postcards have been a success - I have spotted them on several cube walls when visiting clients.

While I’ve been making my own postcard labels for the backs of the photos using some Avery 3.5” x 5” labels, I just ran across these couple sites now selling some labels specifically for this purpose:

http://www.photostix.com/
http://personalizedpostcard.com/

Note that the second one features a pop-out easel for the recipient to use in displaying the photo - neat idea!