Remember that romantic sunset?

The “eraser” lets you practice your doodled effects until they look just right.

I used either an HP A626 compact photo printer or an HP A826 Home Photo Center to design and print my cards.   Click here to see a demo of how easy it is add creative elements to your photos that make them into photo cards.

There are some very good and powerful software applications on the market for doing digital design. I’ve been humbled by more of them than I’d like to admit. These PC-free photo printers do digital design, too, but in such a user friendly way that you may not even realize you are now a digital designer.

Since PC connection is not needed, I could do my card-making when and where I wanted to. The printers never missed a beat during my typical multi-tasking interruptions. I plugged my SD card holding my digital photos into the printer’s SD card slot. The printer automatically displayed the photos on the SD card on its very nifty touch-screen. I selected a photo, largely because of how it made me feel: smile, laugh, special memory, etc., by either touching that image with my finger or with the provided plastic stylus. Simple photo editing was done first, if needed. I found the cropping function to be especially useful to reserve a good space for words. The real fun started when I touched “Get Creative”.

Card messages were added as typed font, drawn on the touch-screen or selected from the available clip art. Even if you don’t think your handwriting looks very good, you have got to try the drawing function. The eraser lets you practice or change what you’ve drawn or written until it looks good.  Best of all, this eraser doesn’t wear down. I know.

The library of clip art and frames is not huge, but it is well tuned to photo card-making for all occasions and provides enough material to explore and vary to create a huge variety of custom card designs. After all, the photo is the main attraction.

Blank space for handwriting is created by printing a 4 x 6 card on    4 x 8 photo paper.

Do all my cards have to be 4 x 6 size?
Not at all. Cards can be printed up to 5 x 7 and panorama photos can be printed as 4 x 12.

How can I leave space for a handwritten signature or message?
Click on the G’day Valentine image to see how printing a 4 x 6 card design on 4 x 8 photo paper creates a blank 4 x 2 text block.

Do these printers also print photos?
Both of the printers I used are great all-around photo printers.  In addition, they have templates on board for printing mini-album pages from your photos. 

Is the quality of the cards as good as photos?
These printed cards are the same high quality as photos when using the recommended photo papers for the printer.

I hope you give photo card-making at home a try and make new designs in your own personal style!