Giving or sending a greeting card always delights the receiver. That’s for sure, but own card does even more. Creating an own greeting card is extremely easy and quick task to complete with today’s equipment. Digital camera is an everyday gadget as well as color printers, like ink jets and lasers. Just snap a photo of a lovely red rose in a vase and become creative. This tutorial uses Adobe Photoshop Elements version 3, but you may use your favorite photo editing software likewise.
I started with arranging the setup. The red rose in picture 1 is actually a fake one. It’s made of plastic, but you can hardly see it. The flower stands in a vase in front of a white wardrobe door. Lightning at home is not always the best one, so I adjusted my Nikon D70s camera to ISO level 1600 and took the picture with flash on. The shot is taken with full automatic program.
In the next phase I removed the background. With Photohop’s magic wand tool this is done like snapping your fingers. When the object clearly differs from its background, this tool finds edges pretty easily. I had tolerance of 32 set as range when sampling colors. With few additive clicks I had fully surrounded the object. Finally hitting the delete key removed the background as seen in picture 2.
Finding edges is not very accurate and leaves them quite sharp. To soften the edges I copied the layer and applied Gaussian blur to the new layer with radius of 4,5 pixels. This filter expands the edges with smooth effect. I left the layer opacity to 100 % and moved the blurred picture below the original one. Now only the softened edges appear behind the stacked layers and the desired effect was reached. I finally repositioned the group more on the left to make room for the written greeting. See picture 3 of the finished greeting card.
Final words
If you like this card feel free and download this composition from my Google Picasa web album. The original greeting card is 3008 pixels wide and 2000 pixels high and stored in PNG format. If you use this picture as part of your own greeting card, you might resize the image to soften the hard edges even more. Before you rush into remixing my card, please read the usage license carefully. The Red Rose Greeting Card by Matti Mattila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 Finland License.