How to Make a Photo Christmas Card in CS3

Create your own photographic Christmas card with InDesign CS3.

Adobe Creative Suite 3 includes a wide array of software programs that help you bring out your own creativity, from the graphic and photographic editing capabilities of Photoshop to the Web design functions of Dreamweaver. For something like a photographic Christmas card, however, you are going to want to turn to InDesign, Adobe's professional quality page layout program. InDesign will allow you to easily import photographs and enter customizable text to create a Christmas card that you can print from your own home or with the help of a professional printer.

Things You'll Need

• Digital images
• Adobe InDesign CS3

Instructions

1. Open InDesign and select "Document" from the "Create New" heading of the welcome screen. Set the number of both pages and columns to two, and set the dimensions according to how large you want the entire card to be when it is open. Set the orientation according to whether you want your card to appear in landscape or portrait mode. Click "OK" when these settings have been adjusted.

2. Use the "File > Place" command to locate and place the photo or photos you want to incorporate into your card. Keep in mind that the way the layout is set up, one of your pages is going to be the front and back of your card, and the other is going to be the two inside pages. You can move photos around after placing them by clicking and dragging inside their borders. You can resize photos by double-clicking in them until the border around them turns brown, and then clicking and dragging out the anchor handles along the border. If part of your photo disappears when you do this, right-click ("Ctrl + click" for Mac users) on the photo and select "Fitting > Fit Frame to Content" from the resulting fly-out menu.

3. Add text to your Christmas card by selecting the "Type Tool" from the tools panel at the left of your screen. You can adjust font, size and spacing settings for your text in the "Character" palette at the right of your screen. Click and drag out a box to contain your text and then begin typing when you are ready. Use the "Selection Tool" from the tools panel to select, move and resize your text box once you have typed out your text.

4. Save your Christmas card by selecting "File > Export" from the control menu. Name the card and make sure the format drop-down menu is set to PDF. This way, you can print your photo Christmas card in high quality from any computer with PDF reading capabilities.

References

• InDesign Support: Create New Documents
• InDesign Support: Add Text to a Document
• InDesign Support: Place (Import) Graphics