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November 06, 2007
[ THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING ]
‘TIS THE SEASON TO BE JOLLY and also the season to be looking out for the Christmas present for the cousins and pals who have everything. We offer a suggestion.
Hunt out twelve (or more) of your best photos – either snaps of the family or great works of art created with the camera in the Austrian alps – and turn them into a 2008 calendar. It couldn’t be easier.
There are a few different ways of doing this, of which the easiest is to pop along to the Camera House Digital shop, 176 Lonsdale street and create your calendar, on the spot, using their Hewlett Packard Photosmart Studio. You take your twelve masterpieces (or more – you can have more than one photo per month) on any sort of medium, CD or memory card, and load it into the terminal. You select a style, arrange the images in preferred order, press the go button, pay at the register and within an hour you will have your calendar 300 by 300mm printed and bound. The service costs $35 for the first and reduces with multiple units from the same input.
If you prefer to do the whole thing from the comfort and privacy of your own PC Hewlett Packard offer an on-line version of the same service at www.snapfish.com.au You need to register on site to use this service and then you select Create Photo Gifts from the options menu. Photo gifts can be books, cards or calendars. You select a style, arrange your photos and upload the whole set of layout instructions and photographs. Delivery takes ten days and costs $25 plus postage. Quality is good but not quite up to the standard of the in-shop alternative and it is smaller.
Photo editing software such as Adobe Photoshop Elements usually includes calendar templates. Doing it this way you have to print the finished item yourself and that needs a good quality A4 printer. Then you toddle along to Officeworks to have the calendar bound. Which would all be acceptable if it were not for the fact that templates in editing software are straitjackets. We have made calendars using Photoshop Elements and they were OK, but they have one drawback – the table of dates is always fitted onto the same page as the photo, whereas with the Hewlett Packard system the photos are on one page and the dates on the next.
There is a better DIY method for making photo calendars – use a Word template. Microsoft has a smorgasbord of calendar templates on their web site. This way of doing the job gives the user control over typeface and font size and also over the dimensions of the table in which the dates are displayed. You can please yourself whether to have the photo on one page and the calendar on another or both together on the same sheet. You need double sided paper for the printing – Ilford make a very nice double sided smooth heavyweight matte paper that is ideal.
Once again the quality of output will depend on the quality of printer and it also involves a trip to Officeworks for the binding.
While you’re about it you might as well get stuck into your own, unique Christmas cards.
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Posted by terry at November 6, 2007 04:11 AM
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