Creative Christmas Card Picture Idea

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Hello everyone!  Well, as my sister already mentioned, I am also having a hard time posting my craft projects on here because, well, they are mostly for the people who read this blog on a regular basis!  I decided to post the picture I made for our family Christmas card last year.  Why can’t I post this year’s????  Hello!  It’s a surprise!  And they won’t be going in the mail for a little while longer, definitely not with enough time to help give anyone any ideas.  So without further ado, here’s the picture and I’ll write a little tutorial below!

First of all, you need a good photo imaging program because, yes, this is just one photo, not several glued together.  I have Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4). 

To set up the photo taking process, we each wore Christmas colors and jeans.  We had one Santa hat (yep, only need one) and one full size piece of blank white poster board.

I took pictures of each family member holding the poster board in front of them.  Hints:  Hold it as flat toward the camera as possible to make the image editing easier, and hold your fingers as close to the edge as possible or you will have to deal with that in editing as well.  We knew our daughter would be the smallest photo so she would not need to hold the poster board (that of course helped a lot too since she is the youngest!).  My husband and I did the “Brady Bunch” look down at the poster board while we were taking the pictures so it would appear we were looking at the kids.  Since the kids grow so much every year I definitely wanted them both looking at the camera.  We stood in front of a blank wall and also angled the poster board in opposite directions for each step down.

If I remember correctly, we took around 500 pictures between the four of us.  I wanted to get our poses just right because I knew very little would be happening in the editing process.  Also, I knew there was no way I would get the family to agree to do it a second time if necessary!!!

The editing was actually the easy part.  However, here you do have to know a little about Photoshop to be able to do it.  I chose my favorite picture of each person and did the basic editing to get the colors to pop, etc.  To begin making one picture, I started with the youngest first.  I made her picture a smart object so it could be easily copied and pasted onto my son’s picture.  I used the free transform (under “edit”) to size her picture down and to skew it to make it fit exactly in the shape of his poster board.  The white frame around each picture is the actual piece of poster board.  I thought it looked a lot cuter with all of us framed.  The less flat you held your poster board during the actual photo taking process, the more you will have to skew it to fit inside the next person’s poster board, thus, the less of a rectangle the inserted pictures will be.  Also, if you didn’t angle the board in the right direction to make it flip flop for each person, you can simply “flip” the image before putting it “on” the poster board.

I did this same process with the picture I just created of my son “holding” my daughter, and I imposed them onto the piece of poster board I was holding in my picture…etc, etc, until we were all in one picture.  I did a few more slight color fixings so it would look as close to one photo as possible, and Ta Da!  A super fun Christmas card! 

We got SO many compliments, but the best part was it was also SUPER FUN to make!  This years was a lot of fun too and hopefully I will remember to post it after we send it in the mail!

Tags: Christmas Card, Creative, family, Marissa, Photo, Picture

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