The Personal Touch With Custom Greeting Cards

There will always be a place for the personal touch of custom greeting cards as I'm sure you will agree. E-cards have there place but its the personal touch of a physical card that says something that words can even describe.

You may actually make customized greeting cards yourself for friends and loved ones, I just finished making my engagement invitations with my beautiful bride-to-be, Lauren. We have had so many great comments on how beautiful our invitations and are really glad now that we didn't go down the e-card path or just buy generic off the shelf invitations.

I did get some tips from subscribers to this website , so thanks for that. We went to a local craft supply shop and pick out the stock and materials we needed and went from there. We went home and eagerly started making up samples and I got to work in photo shop and I started setting up templates and looking though my collection of fonts.

It was so much fun and I felt both Lauren and I connected in a way we hadn't before. I was wonderful experience to share with each other. I actually believe it brought us closer together in a way we hadn't experienced before.

This is our final engagement invite design.

Anyway, while I was working away in photo shop it got me thinking about my subscribers and people who got a copy of my book on starting a greeting card business. It hit me that not all of them will have a copy of photo shop and all the other desktop publishing tools I have and take for granted for making custom photo greeting cards.

They are quite expensive if you only use them for a creating your own greeting cards as a hobby. So I went online and did some detective work. I was on the lookout for cheap but good software I could recommend to my subscribers.

I did find a really cool solution in one of the blogs I subscribe too and it was a press release actually that caught my eye about an Internet based personal publishing company and photography community called Photo works.

They announced that they had added all these really cool photo editing tools to there existing array for designing custom printed greeting cards. The new tools give you the ability to crop or rotate your images, fix re-eye, adjust brightness and contrast, and apply additional special effects.

Some of the special effects features let you apply borders, shapes, sepia, black and white, vignette, color boost or soften, and matte effects. You can also add text, re-size, crop and adjust exposure to any Photo Works' photo, and is integrated into Photo Works wherever you edit your photos.

I think this is a really amazing resource and you can register for free and they give you 25 free prints. If you do make customized photo greeting cards then this is a great online solution you can use without having to go out and buy expensive software. And because it is web based, you can access the service anywhere you have an Internet connection. Very cool! Have I said very cool too much already? :)

Another feature I really liked apart from the creative ways you can tell a story with your photos and images, is the feature that lets you share your creations with others. It makes creative photo editing simple and a great resource for making customized greeting cards.

This Internet services allow PC and Mac users to share and store their digital photos, host personalized My Share Web pages, sell one-of-a-kind products through My Storefront, join photo communities, and create hardbound photo books, customized greeting cards , calendars, prints and other photography-sourced products.

Formerly known as Seattle Film Works, PhotoWorks has a 30-year national heritage of helping photographers share and preserve their memories with innovative and inspiring products and services.

So if you want to get your hands on this powerful set of photo editing tools that enables you to edit, share, and print photos in any Internet browser(IE, Firefox, Safari, Mozilla, etc.) and with any computer platform (PC, Mac, Linux), then I suggest you can go check out how to make your custom greeting cards using this service here at Photoworks.com .

Discover how to establish your own greeting card niche .