Create a Christmas Card in Photoshop Easily
If you’re anything like me, this holiday season has flown by. Christmas is just around the corner, and you have only 1 weekend left to get cards out to your friends and family. With that being said, you don’t have to settle for generic store-bought cards with blanket messages to everyone. You can create your own sophisticated Christmas Card in Photoshop in almost no time at all. In just a few minutes you can create a Christmas card in Photoshop like the one shown below.
Before you start designing your card, you need to consider what type of card that you are going to create in the first place. You can create a simple single-page, front and back card, or you could create a bi-fold card. If you create a bi-fold Christmas card in Photoshop, you are still essentially creating a front and back card, but it will be divided along the middle, with one side being the outside of the card and the other side being the inside of the card. Typical sizes for Christmas cards are 4″ x 8″ flat, which are long and thin, 5″ x 7″ flat, or 5″ x 7″ folded, meaning that the paper you start with should be 10″ x 14″. We will cover how to make a 5″ x 7″ folded Christmas card.
Create a new Photoshop Document, making the size 14″ tall by 10″ wide. We will fold this along the center of its height, giving us a landscape Christmas card that folds at the top. Set the resolution to 300ppi, because we will be printing the card, so the images need to be crisp for printing purposes. If we design our card at 72ppi, then our image will look pixelated or blurry when printed. You can start your design in RGB color mode, but remember to change it to CMYK when you are finished editing your Christmas card in Photoshop.
You may want to lay out some guides, just to help you remember the boundaries of the card and where you can place images and text. For printing purposes, it is a good rule to leave a 1/8 of an inch of space around the edge of any printed surface. This will ensure that you leave enough room for all of your printed areas to show up without any content being cut off. Below, you can see how I set up my guides. You can hit Command + “R” to show or hide your rulers, and you can right-click on the ruler lines themselves, which will bring up a menu where you can choose your unit of measure. I changed mine from pixels to inches. I set up the guides at 1/8 of an inch around the border, and set a guide in the center to mark the fold line of the card.
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