Any advice in using Lightroom or Photoshop to print greeting cards?

[Bob_B]

I've got it into my head to try my hand at printing greeting cards this year, and purchased some card printer paper from Red River. I have the option of using Lightroom 4.2 or Photoshop CS4 for this printing. I had initially thought that LR would be the best way to go, as I really like how it handles digital images, but after reading the instructions at Red River about the limitations of printing cards from LR, I'm not so sure. With that as a preface, I would appreciate any advice you may have to offer. Thanks in advance.

Bob

[Ken Bennett]

I have used both to print cards from RR. Lightroom does a great job with the actual printing -- you just need to carefully set up your template and make sure you understand which way is up when you print I have separate templates for horizontal and vertical cards, too.

For me the major issue with Lightroom is that I can't figure out how to print text on the back of the card (of course it's the same side as the image, but it's the back once folded.) I want a title and caption, but AFAIK Lightroom won't do that in exactly the spot I want. I'd love to be wrong about this.

In Photoshop, I create a document for each size and orientation of card, put guidelines in all the useful places, and save it out as a TIFF file. Then I open, say, the 5x7-horizontal document, insert the photo, add some text to the "back," and print it. Then I do a Save As for that specific card so I can print more copies later. I get more control this way, but it's not quite as seamless as using the LR print panel.

[Alan Goldhammer]

For me the major issue with Lightroom is that I can't figure out how to print text on the back of the card (of course it's the same side as the image, but it's the back once folded.) I want a title and caption, but AFAIK Lightroom won't do that in exactly the spot I want. I'd love to be wrong about this.

Easy enough to do.  Create an identity plate containing the text you want and position it on the back of the card in the location you want.  You can size the type appropriately and change the color as well.

[JeanMichel]

Hi,
For a simple layout like this Photoshop will be much easier to use. PS lets you use any of your fonts, has some controls for character and paragraph, and so on. I would definitely use PS to create your cards and go back to LR to do the printing.

Perhaps a future version of LR will include a feature to format and position text on a print.

Jean-Michel

[redriverpaper]

Our LR card templates are set up with the Identity Plate in the correct location for printing on the back of the card.  They correspond with popular scored note card sizes and some of our specialty sizes as well.

http://www.redrivercatalog.com/cardshop/help/lightroom-greeting-note-card-printing-templates.html

The highest level of creativity and layout freedom will come from Photoshop.  LR is good overall, but you're working in a pretty constrained space design wise.

[Ken Bennett]

Easy enough to do.  Create an identity plate containing the text you want and position it on the back of the card in the location you want.  You can size the type appropriately and change the color as well.

Thanks! Never thought of using an identity plate for anything, let alone the back of the card. Will try this tonight.

[Toyotany]

I started printing greeting cards after ordering the sample from RR. 7x10. Being a Lightroom newbie I never tried to use it for the text message and went right to MS Word. Created 2 templates (landscape,portrait). Used the test pages that RR supplied and marked them to show orientation in my printer, a Canon iP4600.

[John McDermott]

I have had great sucess using Red River's card stock and their Greeting Card Designer (which is a library of Photoshop actions). I massage my photos on LR4.2, edit in either CS5 or CS6, and save the resulting file as a PSD in Lightroom, then use LR to print. Works great!

[mstevensphoto]

for my time and money millerslab and Whcc are the only way to go on greeting cards.

[Remo Nonaz]

I do my card printing in Photoshop and take advantatge of the layers. I have a layer for the image, a couple of layers for text, a layer for the information on the 'back' of the card, and perhaps most importantly, a layer with instuctions since I don't use this that often.

By turning on the different layers I can print the inside, outside and read the instructions