Free Lighroom Greeting Card Templates
For those of you that use White House Custom Color for making greeting cards, I’ve made two (5″x7″) Lightroom 2.6 RC templates (one for a Landscape format, and the other for a Portrait format). These presets make a uniform 0.25″ white border around your photos. I made these on a Mac, and don’t know if they’ll work on a PC, though I’d love to know if they do.
To install the templates, first download the zipped Presets File and unzip it. Then you have two options:
1) With Lightroom no running, drag the two template files to the appropriate location for Mac users: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Print Templates/ then you should be done.
2) Or, you may, while in the Print Module, right click on the “User Presets” folder (in the Templates Panel) and choose “import”. Find the files you’ve unzipped (NOT the .zip file!) and install them. You should be ready to go.
To use the templates, here’s my workflow: take an image that I want to turn into a greeting card, make a virtual copy, and crop it to a custom aspect ratio of 6.5 x 4.5. This will fit exactly in the either template without having to use the “zoom to fill” feature which will effectively crop your image in a manner you cannot control. Then choose the format that fits your image, and click “Print to file”. The preset makes a jpeg file with an embedded Adobe RGB profile which you can save to a folder of your choosing. Now you have the front of your greeting card. I then use Apple’s Pages application to make a back to the card which has relevant information about the image. I export (File>Export) that image as a pdf and then open it in Preview and save a 300 dpi jpeg to the same folder as the front image. I then synchronize the folder and in Lightroom, and stack the front and back images, do appropriate keywording and I then have a print ready greeting card that I can submit using ROES to WHCC. Here’s what the back of my greeting cards look like:
The back image for the above greeting card.
By the way, don’t adjust the margins in the preset, even though it looks like I’ve messed up and made them non-uniform; the reason is that the WHCC cards are submitted in the dimensions 5.125″ x 7.25″ and are trimmed down (very accurately) to 5″x7″. As far as my experience goes, this trimming is performed symmetrically, and this allows me to make my templates so that the final trimmed card has a uniform border.
December 21st, 2009 at 2:47 pm
I’m proficient in LR, but don’t understand a couple of things:
I’m in the PC world, so I’m not familiar with Apple Pages. What does that do and what is the PC equivalent?
How do you “stack the front and back images,” ? How do you merge the 2 images together to come up with a front and back of the card?
thanks,
Reid
December 21st, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Hi Reid,
Apple’s Pages is a word processing/page layout program. I imagine that Microsoft Word (or OpenOffice) would work.
Of course Adobe Illustrator would work too. The key is to make the file the correct size (5.125″ x 7.25″) and respect the cut lines that WHCC uses—
so that your top and bottom lines of text don’t get cut off.
When prints are submitted to WHCC, you use their ROES software, and you select a folder of images and then you drag and drop your prepared files onto the card template.
I drag the front image to the front, the back image to the back (all clearly labelled in the software), and do nothing for the inside spread since I make blank cards. (There’s no merging of images needed.)
Once you’re a WHCC customer, you can download template files that will help you design the cards yourself if you like (although my Lightroom templates should take care of the front for you).
Send me an email if you like, and I can email the WHCC template files.
I hope this helps—let me know if I can clarify things more fully. Did my templates work on the Windows version of Lightroom?
Cheers,
-paul
December 21st, 2009 at 11:07 pm
OK, now I get. I’m working totally within LR so I won’t be using the WHCC service.
I haven’t tried your templates, but may tonight as a starting point. I want to make templates so I can print occasional card in LR. I may make an export preset with a PS action to make a drop shadow and bring it back into LR.
Thanks for your presets. I’m see how they work. I’m just surprised that more people haven’t posted printing presets.
Thanks,
Reid