Let me start by saying that is you haven’t seen the gazillion tutorials for all the amazing things picnik can do you are missing out. I also might add that while there are plenty of free options I am a premium member, and to me it’s well worth the money! Here is my creation in Picnik that I’ll be walking you through. I ordered 65 cards for less than $20 (with shipping)!
1. To start open picnik and upload any pictures that you wish to use. Make sure if you want to do any edit or frames you do it to each individual picture and save them. All of your saved changes will show up in your picnik “History”
2. Go back to your Home tab, and click on the “Collage” section at top of the page.
3. It doesn’t matter which collage you choose since we’ll be customizing it. What does matter is that you determine the background color and the proportions in the left column about two-thirds the way down. You can choose your background color by clicking on the spacing color box. There is a color picker tool if you want to grab a color from something else or if you know the color graphic number. The proportions are a bit tricky. Obviously a 50:50 proportion is a perfect square, and a 40:60 is a 4×6. After that to me it’s a crap-shoot.
4. If you want to add a picture choose a collage layout you like. For my example I used one of the basic layouts, proportions are 60:40 and my spacing color is black. To insert a picture, at the bottom right of the screen you will see a “Photo Bucket” with a drop down arrow. Click on that. If you don’t see the picture you were looking for, click on “Get from Computer drop-down arrow” and “History” will show up. This will display all the pictures you have worked on in Picnik. Select your picture, then drag and drop into the frame you want to fill.
5. Everything else we will be customizing, so click on the “Done” button in the top right of your screen. This will take you to the home editing screen. Here you can pay with adding text, adding stickers, you name it it. I’ll walk you through the step I used to create our card, but just know the possibilities are endless.
6. For my card, I went onto the “Featured” tab. If you go to the bottom they have Seasonal, and then Holiday options. They have some super cool options, like a snowflake frame with “Winterize” option- which doesn’t work for this picture, but I can already see how cut that would look on a picture of some kiddos in the snow. I would add it to the individual picture before the collage too, then you could match the background color to blend in with the snowflakes. You can change the color of the snowflakes too when you are selecting the snowflake frame.
I digress, I actually went with the “Holiday Textures” and choose the sparkling Christmas Tree. You’ll notice this puts the tree right over our picture.
Simply click on the horizontal shift button to move it to the other side.
And you get this…I also “faded” the frame a little with the frame edit toolbar to help lighten the contrast for the text.
I also wanted to feature a picture of my little man smiling, so again I clicked on the “photo bucket” on the bottom of the page and chose a picture from my “History.” You can choose to put the picture anywhere on your page you also can change size & rotate, but that is all the options you get, hence it’s important to edit your picture the way you want before creating the collage, or you can go back and make modifications to them and save your work here.
Last step, Click on the text tab at the top and type in the text you’d like to appear. I choose to have 2 separate text boxes, one with a greeting and one with our name. One thing to keep in min during this process is what print size are you planning to make. Most digital prints don’t fit in a standard print size. For example a 5×7 is wider and shorter than a 4×6 and so on. So make adjustments to your picture accordingly to prepare for that. I created my proportions as a 4×6 so I should be good.
The best thing about this is you can save and print anywhere as a regular old print. I ordered my prints straight through picnik (With Qoop) and am receiving 65 prints for less than $20…shipping included!
Hope this tutorial was helpful.
Join us for more homemade holidays features until December 23rd with the…
(I told you… SIMPLE) The open back one has a few more steps.
