Make your own Christmas cards online

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Make your own Christmas cards online

Thursday, December 25th, 2008 | Best Of, Photos |

Earlier this year we bought a Nikon D40 DSLR. We’ve been getting great pictures from it, so my wife decided to make our Christmas cards using pictures of the kids.

She found a red tablecloth in our Christmas boxes to use as a backdrop. You can see how the tablecloth is draped over the couch in the picture below. The girls are already so tall that next year we’ll need to hang the tablecloth from a higher point.

Our lighting couldn’t have been simpler. For some of the pictures we used the camera’s built-in flash, but we used available light as much as possible. We turned on all the lights in the living room and had the door and drapes open to let in morning sunlight. (One tip we’ve heard from multiple people is that kids are usually easier to photograph in the morning. As the day goes on they get crankier and less cooperative.) As a bonus, morning light and evening light comes in low, so it peaks in through the windows. You can see sunlight coming from a side window in the middle of that second picture above.

After taking the pictures I did some simple tuning in Google’s free Picasa software. All pictures got Auto Contrast (under the Basic Fixes tab) and one round of Sharpening (under the Effects tab). Each of those operations involves clicking a single button. A few pictures were cropped and a few more had red eye removed with the Red Eye button (also under Basic Fixes). Some other Effects you might try are Saturation (to boost the color) and B&W or Sepia (to remove the color and create the look of a faraway classic).

My wife printed the best pictures on a card from Walgreens.com using their online printing service and picked them up from a local Walgreens a few hours later. Cost was $10 for 20 cards. The cards are ready to stamp, address, and email with no envelope required.

Making our own Christmas cards online was quick, inexpensive, and fun. We liked the results so much we’ll be doing it again next year. The only glitch was that Walgreens’ site lost our card several times before successfully saving it, so my wife had to recreate the layout more than once. We’re hoping Walgreens has that bug fixed next year.

Tags: d40, nikon