Get started editing photos to fit your holiday card, invitation or announcement just right!
Did you know that PurpleTrail allows you to fully customize your invitations and cards? You can make professional looking cards as easily as we do, with the tools in PurpleTrail Design Center (PTDC). Today we will show you how you use the design center to upload and rework your photos, to create a unique card that you will love.
I am starting from scratch, creating a new design. Here you can see that we have many tools in the tool bar.
It can be overwhelming when you first try designing, so let me give you just a few tools that you can use to manipulate your photos.
Today I’m going to concentrate on these tools:
1.Crop
2.Resize
3.Flip
4.Effects
5.Border
6.Align
First, I want to upload a photo so that I can start working with it. I go to the “get photos” button on left hand side, under “Photos” and proceed to upload my first photo.
Once I’ve uploaded my first photo, I drag it onto my workspace and it should look like this
Photos always come in uncropped and with a white border around them.
I’m going to crop this photo first, before I do anything else, to get it to be the shape that I want. I select my photo, the the “crop” tool in the top tool bar.
This tool allows you to crop your photo as a square or circle. I chose the “square” option and I move the orange crop marks to where I would like the crop to be. Be sure the crop is inside the photo area, or else it will create a gap and cause problems later.
I press “done” and my photo is now cropped.
It still has a border around it, so I am going to take off the border for now by selecting my photo and going to the border tool on the top tool bar and typing “0″ this removes the white border completely
I am now going to resize the photo by clicking the “resize button”
I type in 175 pixels, and since it is a square, it will automatically make both the hight and width 175. I push done and go back to the design center.
Sometimes a photo may look better by flipping it horizontally or vertically. Make sure your photo is still selected and hit “Flip Horizontal”.
In this way, you can correct any photos that may have been uploaded upside down or the wrong way.
You also have the option of turning any photo or embellishment into black and white, or creating an “antique” effect. While making sure my photo is still selected, I click on “Effects”
I can see a preview of how my photo will look with either effect.
I click on “Black and White” and click done.
My photo looks completely different than when I first uploaded it!
I decide that I would like to add a border now, so I click on the “Border” option on the top tool bar, this shows me a screen where I can choose what color I would like my border to be.
I choose red, and then, type in “5″ for the thickness of the border.
Now I have a nice, thick red border around my photo.
I upload three more photos, going through all of the processes that I did with the first photo, cropping,resizing,effects, and adding the same border.
If you are having trouble aligning your photos, like I do, you can use the handy “Alignment tool”.
First, select all three photos by holding down the shift key and clicking on each.
Then select the type of alignment you need. I chose the “Align Vertical Centers” option at the top middle. Since they are all squares, it will align them so that they are an even distance apart.
Now that I have my photos the way that I want them, I add other embellishments to my card. Now I’m free to either have Purple Trail print my beautiful creation, or I can print at home or even send them over email!
I hope this little tutorial has helped you discover that there are so many ways to create your perfect card, and it’s easy and FUN!
