DIY Network

Macro Photography: Making Postcards From Your Photos From "The Whole Picture" episode DTWP-102

Turn your beautiful macro flora photos into postcards.

In "Lesson 4" of DIY's macro photography series, professional photographer Erin Manning offers tips on turning your macro-floral photos into beautiful postcards.

To create the postcard, Erin selects, crops, resizes and prints the image in postcard size. It's easy to do, and using your computer's photo-editing software gives you a range of options for expressing your own creativity and getting the exact image you want.

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	Photo-editing software enables you to manipulate your images. Here, we used it to select and re-size an image in order to print it out in postcard dimensions.

You can buy paper in many different sizes and shapes but if you're going to mail it as a postcard, you have keep it within certain sizes for the post office to mail it. The minimum size you can use is 3 1/2 by 5 inches and the maximum is 4 1/4 by 6 inches. Just make sure that your paper is at least 1/7,000 of an inch and no thicker then 1/4 inch. All that information is on the paper package so just do your homework

Here are the steps to resize your picture, using photo-editing software, to fit on a postcard:

1. Scan through the pictures in your folder and select the one that will work best as a postcard.

2. Double-click your selection to open the image file.

3. Select the crop tool from your tool bar.

4. Select preset options menu and choose 6"x4" to keep the correct aspect ratio for postcard dimensions.

5. Crop the image using the crop tool. Simply drag the crop-tool cursor across the portion of the image that you want to use. After you've drawn the properly sized box using the crop tool, you can move the box around over the image if you want to use a different portion.

6. When you're happy with the results, hit enter.

7. Save the image.

8. Select print from the file menu.

9. Then choose 6x4 from print size menu.

10. Set paper size.

11. Hit "print."

RESOURCES :

PC Photo magazine
Website: www.pcphotomag.com
Online version of the magazine devoted to digital photography and related technologies.

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