Today I want to take you through the easy steps to make a professional Valentine’s card with text in Photoshop.
The Valentine’s Card I created here as an illustration ~ … and to email my hubby on Valentine’s day ~ took me all of 15 minutes to make, start to finish.
How did I do it?
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Photoshop Valentine Card Tutorial in 10 Easy Steps
Start Photoshop, open a New file and select 5 x 7 inches, at 300 dpi. 5×7 is a standard gift card size, and 300 dpi will give you an photographic quality for your print. Hold down the ‘control’ key and type ‘a’, to select the entire background field.
Click in the bottom right of the two color swatches in your tool palette to manipulate the background color. Choose a color from the pop-up color menu and press OK. Press ‘Del’ and that color will appear. Click out of your file (right next to it) to ‘deselect all’.
Click in the top left of the two color swatches in your tool panel to select the color for your text. Choose a color from the pop-up color menu and press OK.
Choose the Text tool in your tool palette (the ‘T’ icon in your tool palette), and type ‘Happy’. Then click on any of the select tools (ie. the top four images in your tool palette) to deselect the Text tool. Choose the T tool again, and type ‘Valentine’s’, then click on any of the select tools. Choose the T tool again, and type ‘Day’, then click on any of the select tools.
In your ‘layers’ panel, highlight the ‘Happy’ layer, and select ‘Duplicate Layer’. Do this at least 6-7 times.
Now do the same with the ‘Valentine’s’ -layer, and the ‘Day’-layer.
Choose the Text tool again, and click into any of your words to manipulate them. Then, highlight the whole word with your mouse and change the size and/or font and/or style. The options to do so appear on the top of your page when you have the text selected.
To make the text go vertical, choose the ‘Edit’ option on your top menu. Choose ‘Transform’, choose ‘Rotate 90 o’
Layout: Choose the T tool to select the text you want to move and then the Arrow tool or the arrows in your keypad to move it in position.
Good luck designing.
Photoshop Design Tips
a. Healthy habits include: save every few minutes. Control+S is the keyboard shortcut to do so.
b. Keep your color scheme simple if your text variations are complex. Don’t choose too many fonts as some repetition is a good thing.
c. The flowers are also text. Choose a font like ‘Wingdings’ and ‘Dingbats’ and you’ll find many cute images such as these.
d. When you are all done, save your work with all the layers as a Photoshop file. Mark that it is an ORIGINAL FILE and put it in a special place somewhere. Give this a meaningful name that will allow you to recognize what it is when you come across it again. So, choose CardVal09 or similar instead of T13249.
e. Now, while that file is still open, choose File, Save As and choose another name. With this new file, you can play around and make variations. Do not use your original file, because you are bound to overwrite it at some stage.
f. Of course, once you get the hang of making this card and variation on it for your friends and family, there is no stopping you. Now you have a template for a Birthday Card, an Anniversary Card, Happy Holidays and on and on. Control+c is for ‘copy’ and control+v is for ‘paste’.
g. Because you started with a high dpi, your card could easily be published as a poster. Go to Image, choose Image size and in the pop-up you can alter your image size at the cost of some resolution. Do not go below 185 dpi as it will be too grainy.
h. You can email the card, you can print it on card stock with a color printer, you can send it in to your digital photo developer and glue the photo onto a fancy paperstock card that’s slightly larger than the image. Actually, I would shrink the image size by 1/2 an inch each way and stick to the 5×7 dimensions for your fancy card stock. Of course you can then embellish the central flower with a simple craft flower…. etc. Let your creativity and passion roam.
And there you have it: your Easy-to-Make Valentine’s Card! Done.
