Expert: LizaL - 2/8/2007

Question
Hi,
I am not sure if this is a question that you can answer for me or not.  Can you tell me how to make Birthday invitations using Adobe Photoshop?  I would like to make some for my daughter's B-day but have no idea how.  I have used Adobe Photoshop a little bit but to be honest with you I am not too familiar with it.  I want to make an invitation that has a picture on it of her B-day theme (which would be My Little Pony) and possibly some sort of background and also the party info on it.  Does that make sense?  Can this even be done in Adobe Photoshop?  If so where do I find the image?  I looked under "images" in Google search but all I came up with is a picture of a My Little Pony.  How do I get a background of something like trees, grass, flowers etc. to go behind the pony?

If you could help me I would greatly appreciate it.  Also, is there maybe an easier program for doing all of this?

Thanks!
Jen  

Answer
Hi Jen,

To be perfectly honest with you, I wouldn't create a birthday invitation in Photoshop. You say you're not really too familiar with Photoshop, and that's mainly why I wouldn't suggest using it. I think you might become frustrated -- and quite honestly, a greeting card might be an ambitious project for a Photoshop beginner. Yes, it can be done -- and you can find all sorts of images through Google Image Search and put them all on different layers in Photoshop to create the effect you might be after.

But there are programs out there that are specifically tailored to creating birthday (and all sorts of greeting) cards, and that's what I'd use, if I were you.

I found this link that compares some of the better software packages:
http://greeting-card-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

The cheapest is by Broderbund, a leader in educational software, and it's only $11.99. And if you went the route of a dedicated software package for greeting card creation, you'd no doubt use it again in the future.

Another reason I wouldn't use Photoshop for this kind of project is because you'd no doubt need type on the card, and Photoshop, being a bitmap program, isn't geared towards the creation and manipulation of type.  Good-looking, printable type is vector-based, not bitmapped, and programs like QuarkXPress and InDesign are better at handling type than Photoshop.

So that's my opinion -- but if you're intent on using Photoshop, I'll be happy to help you with some basic instruction.

Hope this helps,

Lisa