Making an easy card in Photoshop Elements

If you’re on my Christmas card list and want to be surprised, don’t read this today! =)  The cards just got mailed today thanks to my Advent Calendar. =)  Today’s December Daily is all about making my Christmas card, and getting my three year old daughter to help me mail them! She loved putting on the labels, stamping, and hopping out to the mailbox!  She was a Mail Frog.  No, I don’t know why =) 

I love Photoshop Elements!  It’s really easy to use and you can make fancy cards and layouts.  Here’s how I made ours this year.

Open a new project in the dimensions you want to print.  I print 4X6 photos because then my cards are just 20 cents or so each. 

I took a picture of my kids on the couch.  Then I used the healing brush to kind of spread the couch blue color to the top where you could see my wall.  Just Alt click to select the blue part of the couch and you can smudge the picture until it looks all blue in the background. 

I also adjusted the levels slightly.  In the bottom right task bar you can add a levels layer, and I just adjusted it slightly to brighten it.  Take the far right slider and move it down a bit, take the middle greys one and move it a bit to the left, and the far left one (the darks) and move it to the right a bit.  Just play till you like what you see! 

Then I started adding layers and using a photoshop brush to add the snowflakes.  I added it in several different layers so if I didn’t like one it was easy to delete it.  The brush I used is called Snowtime_by_Crazy_Alice.  I faded some by moving down the opacity. 

The text I used is called Girls are Weird, and it’s available free from dafont.com.  

Then I dropped a ribbon from a Shabby Princess Season Sampler Free Kit and called it good!

Here’s the original picture:

 Here it is after I edited the picture to get rid of the distracting background:

And here’s the completed card:

If you need more help on where to find the tools I mentioned in Photoshop, leave a comment!  I’ll add screenshots, but now I hear the baby waking up and I’ve gotta run!