Have you ever wanted to share your photography with friends and family in a cheap, easy, and physical medium? So did I! A few weeks ago. I had been looking for a way to materialize my work so that I could share my photography with my friends and family, aside from just giving them prints. I thought about several project ideas including calendars, greeting cards, and even photo books, but none of them seemed to get to the heart of what I wanted to do. I wanted a simple, personal way of sharing my work, and that’s when I stumbled upon the idea of printing postcards!
I’ve been a fan of printing my own work since earlier in the year when I purchased a Canon Pixma PRO 100 printer, as well as some fine art printing papers, but I had never attempted to print postcards before. My first step was to get some paper, but I definitely rushed when picking out my first batch of printing sheets. I did a quick lookup for postcard-sized (4”x6”) paper on Amazon and bought a cheap stack that seemed alright, but when I finally received it and did a few draft prints, I realized that I had made a very dumb mistake. I hadn’t bought coated paper and with every print, I was getting a very cheap-looking, low quality, blurry mess. I scrapped the stack and put it on my art shelf (in case I could find a future use for them) and I went back online to do some more research. I found a few recommended brands, but eventually settled on buying a stack of 50 sheets of postcard photo paper from Red River Paper Co. They arrived pretty quickly and in great packaging (much better than the sheets I bought from Amazon). Once I unboxed them, I got my printing gloves and I started testing right away!
I had to adjust my print settings a little bit because the color and brightness was a little off, but after some finetuning, I started seeing the results I had been looking for. The last thing I needed to do was print a postcard-y template on the backside so that I could write in addresses and a short message. I booted up photoshop and developed this quick template using example I found of other postcards on Google Images:
Feel free to use this template for your own postcards!
After printing a couple of test prints, I realized that it’s better to print the backside with the template first before printing the photo itself because of possible damage along the edges, but after fitting that into my printing workflow, I started coming up with some great prints! Overall, I was very pleased with both the quality of the paper and the prints and I felt great knowing that I had learnt a new skill and service I could even provide to future clients of mine.
What about you? Have you printed your own postcards before or considered it? Do you have any other ideas about bringing your photos into “the real world?” If so, please feel free to leave them in the comments below! I’d love to hear from all of you!
Anyway, I’ll see you guys in the next post. Have an awesome week!
- Zig