[stressedmom]

Hi, I am very new to Gimp and downloaded it to try to save our family some money on my daughters graduation invitations. Needless to say I KNOW NOTHING, lol...Husband was recently unemployed due to plant closing and the local photographer that took her senior pictures wants a FORTUNE to make those cute say 4 x 9 picture graduation party invites..So I thought I could do them myself--NOT, LOL.

Can anyone, hahaha do this for me or at least tell me HOW to do them? I was looking to download one as the background picture and then adding a few little ones (2 at least) say at the bottom corners and THEN I need to be able to either type the party date, time etc. on the back of picture card or somewhere on the front.

Can anyone tell me how to do this or should I give up, lol and just pay the $400 to have them done ASAP?

Thanks,
Diane
Stressedmom

[alexstandiford]

Funny, I JUST posted a tutorial on graduation invitations last week - the tutorial can be seen here Gimp Tutorial - Graduation Invitations for 2012 using Gimp

If you need any help don't hesitate to ask!

PS - the service mentioned in the blog post can handle the mailing and printing for you too for less than 400 dollars too. It's actually really cool.

This post has been edited by alexstandiford: 07 May 2012 - 05:44 PM

[Solartide]

Heck, if you type out a detailed idea of what you want the invitation to look like, or hand draw a sketch, I can make a tutorial on how to get the end result.

Alex made it seem fun so I tried my hand (Version 2 on right):



The text is a little hard to read, I would improve on it next time I made one. Also some aspects don't sit right with me, specifically the jaggedness of the lettering on top and bottom, as well as the gold backgrounds.

Still, the above took about an hour to make and you can customize it, the steps involved aren't too complicated, if you like I could whip up step by step instructions for you.

This post has been edited by Solartide: 07 May 2012 - 09:47 PM

[alexstandiford]

Solartide, on 07 May 2012 - 06:50 PM, said:

Heck, if you type out a detailed idea of what you want the invitation to look like, or hand draw a sketch, I can make a tutorial on how to get the end result.

Alex made it seem fun so I tried my hand:



The text is a little hard to read, I would improve on it next time I made one. Also some aspects don't sit right with me, specifically the jaggedness of the lettering on top and bottom, as well as the gold backgrounds.

Still, the above took about an hour to make and you can customize it, the steps involved aren't too complicated, if you like I could whip up step by step instructions for you.

Very cool! A fun little tip - I like to use the overlay layer mode for my textures so that it makes them seem "burnt onto the paper."

[Solartide]

I tried putting the papyrus texture on overlay, but it didn't look as well as I liked. I ended up duplicating the layer, blurring the top layer by 5 px and setting that to overlay and lowered the opacity on the bottom layer to around 50.

Alright, I increased the opacity of my bottom papyrus level,and set the text layers in the main body to hard light. This increased the readability.

For the top and bottom text I duplicated the text layer and blurred it by 1 px, I'm liking the end result there:



Also stressedmom, my apologies for cluttering up your thread with my experiments. And don't get too caught up in the jargon, it's a lot easier than it sounds.

This post has been edited by Solartide: 07 May 2012 - 08:51 PM

[stressedmom]

Oh NOOO clutter away I love what you did and I will go now and look at the video and see if I can do it...If NOT (most likely, lol) I will come back send you guys my photo's and let you guys do it, LOL...THANKS so much for answering and I don't think I will be able to do what you 2 have done but I will try, lol. This is my early morning project so probably give it until 8a.m. and I will be pulling my hair out, lol.

Diane..aka stressedmom

Solartide, on 07 May 2012 - 08:28 PM, said:

I tried putting the papyrus texture on overlay, but it didn't look as well as I liked. I ended up duplicating the layer, blurring the top layer by 5 px and setting that to overlay and lowered the opacity on the bottom layer to around 50.

Alright, I increased the opacity of my bottom papyrus level,and set the text layers in the main body to hard light. This increased the readability.

For the top and bottom text I duplicated the text layer and blurred it by 1 px, I'm liking the end result there:



Also stressedmom, my apologies for cluttering up your thread with my experiments. And don't get too caught up in the jargon, it's a lot easier than it sounds.

[Solartide]

I'm sure you would get great results by asking someone here to do them, but creating them yourself has quite a few merits, one of them being an excellent conversation topic.

"I saw those invitations you sent out, they were amazing! Tell me, where did you get them so I can get them for my son/daughters graduation?"
-Well actually I looked around and couldn't find any that I really liked so I tried my hand at making my own...

Again, just say the word and I can type out step by step instructions that should be simple enough to follow.

I had a dream where I was drinking a cup of water, a cup of tea, and a cup of orange juice at the same time. Needless to say I woke up extremely thirsty. And here I am at the computer in the wee hours of the morning nursing a cup of tea.

This post has been edited by Solartide: 08 May 2012 - 01:00 PM

[stressedmom]

Thanks everyone but I GAVE UP, lol...I guess I need to take an OLD FOLKS class on this stuff, lol...But now I have another question PLEASE...So I found this website (zazzle) that makes cheap, nice invitations where you can insert your own photo's and they will make them up...My problem is every time I try to put a photo in I get an error that it is too big...So I spent all day yesterday CROPPING the few pictures I wanted but even then some fit and some don't but now the pictures are sooo cropped that it doesn't even look like my original photo

So I went to my Gimp program, read instructions on scaling the picture from a bigger size down to smaller size..Well, I thought I was doing everything fine, the whole picture is smaller, etc. I hit save and even if I hover over the picture W x H is smaller than original picture but when I try to put those into the picture slots I get an error it is too big and the picture looks even bigger than my original, lol...What the heck am I doing wrong, lol?
Thanks

Solartide, on 08 May 2012 - 12:59 PM, said:

I'm sure you would get great results by asking someone here to do them, but creating them yourself has quite a few merits, one of them being an excellent conversation topic.

"I saw those invitations you sent out, they were amazing! Tell me, where did you get them so I can get them for my son/daughters graduation?"
-Well actually I looked around and couldn't find any that I really liked so I tried my hand at making my own...

Again, just say the word and I can type out step by step instructions that should be simple enough to follow.

I had a dream where I was drinking a cup of water, a cup of tea, and a cup of orange juice at the same time. Needless to say I woke up extremely thirsty. And here I am at the computer in the wee hours of the morning nursing a cup of tea.

[stressedmom]

Solartide, on 08 May 2012 - 12:59 PM, said:

I'm sure you would get great results by asking someone here to do them, but creating them yourself has quite a few merits, one of them being an excellent conversation topic.

"I saw those invitations you sent out, they were amazing! Tell me, where did you get them so I can get them for my son/daughters graduation?"
-Well actually I looked around and couldn't find any that I really liked so I tried my hand at making my own...

Again, just say the word and I can type out step by step instructions that should be simple enough to follow.

I had a dream where I was drinking a cup of water, a cup of tea, and a cup of orange juice at the same time. Needless to say I woke up extremely thirsty. And here I am at the computer in the wee hours of the morning nursing a cup of tea.

Unfortunately I feel step by step will not help this OLD FART, lol...Now if I could get my teenager to stop running around so much and HELP her mother since it is for HER I am sure she could do it since they can do most anything phone/computer related, lol...I am running out of time though so unless I send pictures to someone and they make them for me I have to go with premade ones off the internet but if you see below I am having trouble with even those, lol

[Solartide]

Nonsense! Let's get you started, try out these steps first before you throw in the towel.

First let's assume you follow Alex' advice with this website. Seems like a solid idea, send them your graphic and they print them out for $1.39 each and mail them for you. Heck, postage is about 40 cents as it is!

The card in question is 3.75x5.25 in inches.

Explanations:

Spoiler

For printing we will need to set our pixels per inch to 300. The default 72 pixels per inch looks great on the computer screen, but 1 inch on the screen does not equal 1 inch when printed out.

To make things simple, just create a new image with these settings:



This will be our canvas for designing the invitation.

Before we begin let's have a rough idea in our mind what the layout will be like. The invitation will have 4 sections, like so:



I plan to have the main background image in section 2, the main invitation text in section 3, and sections 1 and 4 are free for whatever.

Since our canvas is 1125x1575 pixels, we will need a Hi Res image for our background.

Before adding anything to the image you will want to create a new layer. This makes editing the details in the future much easier. In fact, I often put individual brush strokes on separate layers to fine tune the end image. Adding a new layer is simple enough, click this button and click ok.



Open up your background image in another Gimp window. Copy the whole thing and paste it into your new image. This will give you a floating selection like this:



A floating selection is essentially a temporary layer. You can use the layer tools to transform, scale, and move the layer. Use these tools to get your background image to look nice where section 2 would be. Be sure when scaling you are scaling the layer and not the whole image.

In the end I decided this placement looked the best:



You'll notice that there are white areas showing above and below the picture- that's perfectly fine. We will cover those areas with section 1 and 4.

When you are satisfied with the positioning, go to the layers dialog again and choose to anchor the floating selection.



This will drop our floating selection on to the layer we created earlier. It is good practice to label your layers by double clicking on them in the layers dialog. In the future you can quickly remember which layer has what elements.

Don't fret too much about the placement of your background image. Since it is on it's own layer you can still move it around later. For now, let's create another new layer.

Take out your Paths tool:



You want to click once above the image, and once below the image. Don't worry too much about the line being perfectly straight, we'll be playing with it in the next step anyway.



While holding down Ctrl, click and drag your line to make a curve. I did this twice to make 2 curves and resulted with this:



Click your bottommost point on the path. Now just click around the outside of your image to complete an area:



Over on the layers dialog, find the paths tab. From there choose "Path to Selection".



This selects the area we made earlier. On the new layer you made, fill this area with white. Just click and drag the white box in your toolbox over to your selection. At this point you can right click and choose "Select None" to get rid of the ant line.

Create another new layer. Right now your image should look something like this:



On your new layer, use the path tool to make another curvy selection:



Fill this with black.

Finally, make a new layer, and finish off the bottom section the same way:



Click on one of your layers filled with black (Sections 1 and 4) in the layers dialog. Right click your image, go to Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur. For the blur radius, choose 75 px. Do this for the other black layer as well, but not the white section 3 layer.

Now the image is starting to look nice:



Click on your white layer now, section 3. In your layers dialog, right click and choose "Alpha to Selection".

Right click the image, Filter -> Render -> Clouds -> Fog. I kept the default fog color, set Turbulence to 1.6 and left Opacity at 100.

This should have added a new layer called "Clouds" to your image. In the layers dialog, right click your new layer and choose "Merge Down".



From here, right click the image and choose Colors -> Colorize. Play with the hue and saturation bars to get the color you want.



In your layers dialog, right click the layer and choose "Duplicate Layer"

In your layer duplicate, bring up the Gaussian Blur dialog again and blur it by 50px. Set this layer to overlay by choosing it from the dropdown in the layers dialog:



In your original Section 3 layer, lower the opacity to around 50, or so that the layer bleeds into your background image but is still solid enough to put text on:



Your image should now look something like this:



Now you can go ahead and add in what you want for sections 1, 3, and 4!

This post has been edited by Solartide: 09 May 2012 - 07:23 PM

[stressedmom]

Solartide, on 09 May 2012 - 05:56 PM, said:

Nonsense! Let's get you started, try out these steps first before you throw in the towel.

First let's assume you follow Alex' advice with this website. Seems like a solid idea, send them your graphic and they print them out for $1.39 each and mail them for you. Heck, postage is about 40 cents as it is!

The card in question is 3.75x5.25 in inches.

Explanations:

Spoiler

For printing we will need to set our pixels per inch to 300. The default 72 pixels per inch looks great on the computer screen, but 1 inch on the screen does not equal 1 inch when printed out.

To make things simple, just create a new image with these settings:



This will be our canvas for designing the invitation.

Before we begin let's have a rough idea in our mind what the layout will be like. The invitation will have 4 sections, like so:



I plan to have the main background image in section 2, the main invitation text in section 3, and sections 1 and 4 are free for whatever.

Since our canvas is 1125x1575 pixels, we will need a Hi Res image for our background.

Before adding anything to the image you will want to create a new layer. This makes editing the details in the future much easier. In fact, I often put individual brush strokes on separate layers to fine tune the end image. Adding a new layer is simple enough, click this button and click ok.



Open up your background image in another Gimp window. Copy the whole thing and paste it into your new image. This will give you a floating selection like this:



A floating selection is essentially a temporary layer. You can use the layer tools to transform, scale, and move the layer. Use these tools to get your background image to look nice where section 2 would be. Be sure when scaling you are scaling the layer and not the whole image.

In the end I decided this placement looked the best:



You'll notice that there are white areas showing above and below the picture- that's perfectly fine. We will cover those areas with section 1 and 4.

When you are satisfied with the positioning, go to the layers dialog again and choose to anchor the floating selection.



This will drop our floating selection on to the layer we created earlier. It is good practice to label your layers by double clicking on them in the layers dialog. In the future you can quickly remember which layer has what elements.

Don't fret too much about the placement of your background image. Since it is on it's own layer you can still move it around later. For now, let's create another new layer.

Take out your Paths tool:



You want to click once above the image, and once below the image. Don't worry too much about the line being perfectly straight, we'll be playing with it in the next step anyway.



While holding down Ctrl, click and drag your line to make a curve. I did this twice to make 2 curves and resulted with this:



Click your bottommost point on the path. Now just click around the outside of your image to complete an area:



Over on the layers dialog, find the paths tab. From there choose "Path to Selection".



This selects the area we made earlier. On the new layer you made, fill this area with white. Just click and drag the white box in your toolbox over to your selection. At this point you can right click and choose "Select None" to get rid of the ant line.

Create another new layer. Right now your image should look something like this:



On your new layer, use the path tool to make another curvy selection:



Fill this with black.

Finally, make a new layer, and finish off the bottom section the same way:



And we have finished our basic project. It's unpolished yes, but that's just another way of saying untapped potential. What kinds of effects, what you want filling each section, all that is up to you.

Just a minute of polishing the image I got this:



But this is what I think would look nice, not what you want.

Play with Gimp a bit after this, see if you won't reconsider making your own. If you have some ideas you would like to share on where to go from here, I would be willing to add steps to achieve that end.

HAHAHA you "make" it look easy but I do believe I will be looking up the local college for a class in GIMP/Photoshop, lol...I love the concept, I LOVE LOVE LOVE taking pictures and would love to know how to do this, lol...At this point I am going to send you the 2-3 pictures...Well 2 pictures is what we would really like, with either printing on back about time, location, etc. of the party or printing on front is great also...What do you charge, lol? I do not think that is expensive and at this point I am about to pay anything, lol...

[Solartide]

Well Stressedmom, if you really want, you can email those pictures to me at "my username @gmail.com". You can find my username on the left.

I'll go ahead and follow my guide and customize it for you.

I'm not going to charge you anything since you can do this yourself.

Please include any details of how you would like it to look and I'll try to incorporate it into the final product. Then I'll go ahead and email you back the image and you should be able to submit it to the website mentioned earlier. I've never used their service, but Alex makes it sound very promising.