How to make your own photocards at home, step by step
Making your own photocards is the best way to have the exact card you want: your favorite photo of your bias, your pet, your friends or a concert night. You need a phone, a printer (or a print shop) and something to cut with.
What you need
- A photo at least 650 × 1004 px (that’s a photocard at 300 ppi).
- Paper: glossy photo paper or 200–300 gsm matte cardstock. See the best paper for photocards.
- A paper trimmer, or a craft knife and a metal ruler.
- Optional: a 3–4 mm corner punch, card sleeves and 35pt toploaders.
1. Choose and frame the photo
Pick a sharp photo with good light. In mallow, start a blank Photocard (55 × 85 mm), add your photo and move and zoom it with your fingers. Use the photo editor if it needs it: 8 filters, brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth, crop and straighten. Your original photo is never modified.
Tip: keep the face away from the edges. About 2 mm all around will be cut off.
2. Decorate it
Add stickers from the tray and drag, pinch and rotate them. Choose a finish: matte, gloss, holo or glitter. Less is more: see 5 ideas to decorate your photocard.
3. Print it at real size
Open Print, choose your printer type and the paper you loaded. mallow lays out the cards at real size: 9 per A4 sheet or 8 per US Letter, with 2 mm of bleed and crop marks. In the print dialog, keep the scale at 100 % and turn off borderless.
First time? Print the test sheet and measure its 100 mm ruler to calibrate. If your cards come out small, read why your photocard prints smaller.
4. Cut it
Wait 10–15 minutes if you used an inkjet. Then cut just inside the crop marks with a trimmer or a craft knife and metal ruler. Cutting inside the marks is safe: the artwork extends 2 mm beyond them.
5. Round the corners and protect it
Round each corner with a 3–4 mm corner punch: that’s the detail that makes it look official. Slide it into a sleeve and then into a toploader.
Make a series
Back in mallow, duplicate the card from the gallery and change the photo. Every card keeps its stickers, so a matching set takes a minute.
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