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Author Topic: "How to" for Making Calendars  (Read 6675 times)

BradSmith

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"How to" for Making Calendars
« on: December 05, 2009, 04:19:56 pm »

There's another thread here about paper for printing calendars, but no general, "How to."  I'd like to print some calendars, but am wondering about how you're getting the monthly calendar graphic created.  Is there software for this?  And how are you getting them bound?

I'm sure that there are many curious people.   Thanks in advance.
Brad
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David Sutton

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"How to" for Making Calendars
« Reply #1 on: December 06, 2009, 03:52:13 am »

Hi Brad. I used to use A4 sheets of heavyweight office paper, punched and bound with ribbon so the calendar was on the bottom sheet and the picture on the top sheet. The calendar boxes were always too small to really write enough stuff.
Now I use Ilford Galerie double sided smooth matte 17x22”. Photo on the top half of the page and calendar on the bottom half. Bound at the top. Either punched and ribbon threaded through, or taken to someone who does ring binding and put together there (better as there is no risk of the whole thing curling in at the top). The Ilford paper is great for writing on but  hasn't got the most wonderful dynamic range. You have to softproof carefully. Also eventually it will curl slightly on the sides at the bottom. They are gifts for friends and so far no one has complained.
For the calendar I use an Open Office template available at
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.ph...&highlight=
Go to the fifth post down and look for “calendar template 070309.ott”. The template is quite adjustable. I delete the days and rows I don't need, change the font and font size, and resize the whole thing to fit the half page, and end up with 12 documents.  Unless you know Open Office you'll be spending a bit of time in the help section. I then do the first print run from Open Office. The second print run does the photos. I place each one into the top of a 17x25 page in Photoshop and run them through the printer again. It would be nice to have the whole thing one one page, but I haven't found anything as flexible where I can change fonts, row sizes, add local events, print the photos from Qimage and so on. And have the calendar go the full page width. There is a plain calendar in Microsoft Publisher which I used one year, but I found it difficult to work with.
Hope that is some use. I'd be interested to hear if there is an easier way to do it.
David

Here is a very rough idea of the A4 calendar from Publisher:
[attachment=18385:Ferrymead_1.jpg]
and the one from Open Office:
[attachment=18384:calendar_1.jpg]
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NikoJorj

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"How to" for Making Calendars
« Reply #2 on: December 06, 2009, 07:47:25 am »

I have been making them for a while at work, using a Word template very akin to the OO's one of Taquin but directly incorporating pictures in Word, with output on a color laser printer (minolta C550, decent but not great as can be expected).

I now print them from Lightroom at home (R1800).
I'm doing the checkerboard-like monthly calendar in Excel (downloadable here in French and with french holidays and weekends greyed by hand), select a month, paste it in Irfanview and save it as a PNG file, to use it as a custom ID plate in lightroom.
You have to do one print template per month/page... but every sheet runs only once in the printer, which avoids scuffing and the like.
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Nicolas from Grenoble
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DRoss

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"How to" for Making Calendars
« Reply #3 on: December 06, 2009, 11:12:03 pm »

I used this last year, modified it a bit moved things about to suit me. The result was a big hit with the family.

http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/calendar
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wolfnowl

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"How to" for Making Calendars
« Reply #4 on: December 07, 2009, 03:23:29 am »

There are some Lightroom calendar templates available here: http://camerasview.com/

Mike.
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Scott O.

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"How to" for Making Calendars
« Reply #5 on: December 07, 2009, 11:27:14 am »

You didn't really mention what quality a calendar you want and whether or not you want to print it yourself.  Most of the online print services (Snapfish, etc.) have calendar templates and are quite easy to use.  You can do one like this for much less than $20 including shipping.  Quality is satisfactory, but of course no match for what you can do yourself.  For the past few years I have used one of these services to do my family calendars, which I give out during the holidays.  On a project like this I really don't want to spend a lot of time printing 20 calendars, so this works very well and everyone likes them.

Tony B.

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"How to" for Making Calendars
« Reply #6 on: December 09, 2009, 10:45:13 am »

If all you are interested in are the actual dates for the calendars there are templates, as others have mentioned, in Word, Open Office and Wordperfect.  You can also buy calendar programs that offer different looks, holidays etc.

Of course the easiest would be to just print out the calendars that are preloaded into Word/Wordperfect.  I ended up not liking the look of these dates.  I then downloaded or bought some calendar building programs and also did not like the look of the calendar.  So, I ended up spending a lot of time building my own calendar dates in Wordperfect.  It took a long time because I have never used the program except for writing simple letters.  That was years ago and I am pretty quick at making my months now.

So, that is information on the dates.  If you want more information here is my history of printing my calendars, copy/pasted from a post I made over in DPreview.  It gives information on starting/ending costs of printing them and ways to save money with binding etc.



This printing company has some of the best prices for bulk calendar printing.

I have not used them so I do not know their quality but a quick check it was below $13 per calendar if ordering 35.

http://www.printpelican.com/calendar-11-8.html

It also looks like you asked this question last year, did you try any place last year?

If so did you not like the quality?

You also asked about price to print your own. If you use OEM inks and have to go out and have them punched/bound you can expect to spend $20 per calendar plus all the time spent. See below to lower that cost 75%.

I have been making my own calendars since 2002. The best thing about printing them yourself is that you made them. You can print different images on each calendar so people get different calendars. I make around 50 per year now and I make 3 or 4 different image selections so not everyone gets the same thing. I also make them with 8.5x11 paper, 11x17 paper and 13X19 paper.

I went from $20 per calendar to probably $4 per calendar. The biggest cost is OEM ink, I changed to 3rd party ink for my calendars. That made the print cost go from approx. $1 per image to 5 cents (10 cents now with pigment ink) per image.

The next biggest cost is the binding. Most places charge about $3 to punch and bind a calendar. To bring this cost down I started taking a box of paper (100-150 sheets) and having them punched for coil binding, that costs approx $3. Then go to an office supply store and buy a box of coils (100 coils for $15), now you have enough coils for a few years of calendars. Now print your images, making sure you position the image on the paper so it does not spray through the punched holes. Then put coils through the holes, trim and bend the ends. Or, print the images 1st then have them punched so you do not have to worry about the holes when printing.

Next cost is paper. If you find a buy one get one free offer for double sided matte paper you can get the paper down to under $.15 per sheet. Also, expect the paper to curl after your done printing and the calendar is hanging on the wall.

So, per calendar price is under $2 for paper, around $1 for ink, under $.50 for punching and $.15 for binding. That puts it under $4 for ink/paper/binding. Then add $1 for wasted ink and paper for misfeeds, loading paper incorrectly and that still puts them under $5.

Now your time. It takes a lot of time to print a calendar from taking the pictures, processing the pictures if you do any post processing. Printing the images goes from under 2 minutes (Canon i960) to 20 minutes (old Epson 890) depending on the printer. Depending on how you make your dates you can print them from a calendar template for a word processor, use a calendar program or make them from scratch. I started making them from scratch because I did not like the look of any templates or programs so add some time for that. Unfortunately they end up having minor errors no matter how many people I have check them over.

To help with time you hope your printer will feed good and use a program like Qimage. Then you can load 24 sheets, load the images in qimage and press print. Come back and hour or two later and if no problems with paper feeding you have images printed for 2 calendars. Then refill your ink (even better if you have a CIS system) and start again.

But, most printers do not feed well, even the pro printers (I now use a Canon iPF5000). My i9900 would not feed alot and you have to help the printer out a lot and that wastes a lot of time. I also would have 50-100 misfeed/print errors for wasted sheets. The iPF5000 feeds much better and last year only had maybe 10 sheets wasted from feeding issues. Still has problems picking paper up so I have to clean the rollers after feeding around 24 pages through.

But, even after all the effort and time I still enjoy making them. It also gives me a reason to get out and take photographs.

Tony

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Lisa Nikodym

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"How to" for Making Calendars
« Reply #7 on: December 09, 2009, 02:43:37 pm »

I created my own calendar template, just using basic tools in Photoshop (drawing lines, text boxes, cut & paste, etc.).  Once I had a template, which was a little tedious but not difficult, it was pretty easy to create the various monthly pages.

Binding is an issue.  I use plastic comb-type binding on the top edge, which is easy to do if you have access to the office device that does the punching & binding.  However, I've never been completely happy with how it hangs on the wall with a comb top.

Lisa
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BobShram

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"How to" for Making Calendars
« Reply #8 on: December 09, 2009, 05:48:47 pm »

M/S Publisher works well for me, I think it uses both Excel and Word.
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Tony B.

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"How to" for Making Calendars
« Reply #9 on: December 09, 2009, 06:40:41 pm »

Lisa, depending on how many calendars you make you could look into this 'thumb punch' and hangers.  I do not see why they would not work with the comb binding, I think it is made to use with the double wire loop binding.

http://www.abcoffice.com/renztcp.htm

and near the bottom of this page it shows the wire calendar hangers

http://www.abcoffice.com/wire_s.htm

Tony
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NikoJorj

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"How to" for Making Calendars
« Reply #10 on: December 16, 2009, 04:35:34 pm »

Quote from: NikoJorj
I'm doing the checkerboard-like monthly calendar [...] as a PNG file, to use it as a custom ID plate in lightroom.
This has one big drawback I forgot, but am just running into now : the ID plate doesn't seem color managed in LR.
For black on white, that doesn't matter, but as long as there is more, it's off.
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Nicolas from Grenoble
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John.Murray

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"How to" for Making Calendars
« Reply #11 on: December 17, 2009, 10:42:20 am »

I 2nd Mike's recommendation of:

 http://camerasview.com/

The templates are numerous and very handy.  For me the real meat is the countless .png calendar overlays that can be effectively placed on any print.  Well worth the 8 bucks - I'll be back next year......

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