It hit them as they walked home after viewing the parade and light displays along Michigan Avenue on the Saturday before Thanksgiving.
More Top Picks Best Coffee Grinders
You see, Francine Olson and her husband, Frank, both 39, have an annual tradition: Each year they send out holiday greeting cards featuring a photo of them in front of a Chicago landmark. (The Olsons hail from California, and the majority of their friends and family live outside the area.)
So as the couple and a friend walked home that Nov. 22, they came upon the Redhead Piano Bar and its distinct glowing marquee on Ontario Street, and they knew they had found this year’s holiday card photo. For Francine is a redhead.
“Our friend lay down on the ground and took a picture of our faces with the sign above our heads,” Francine said. “It just happened spur of the moment.”
A pocket-size 4-megapixel Canon PowerShot S400 digital camera (about $500 retail) was used to snap the photo.
Then Frank, a graphic designer, went to work on the image. He brought it into Adobe Photoshop on his Windows-based PC and made the following artistic alterations:
– He whitened and brightened the couple’s teeth.
– Using the airbrush tool, he added white snowflakes on the photo.
“The longer you hold down the mouse button, the bigger the dots appear,” Frank said. “I clicked randomly, adding small, medium and large flakes.”
– He added a beveled white border to the image, creating a glass-dome effect for the photo.
“I figured the theme would be a snow-globe look this year,” he said.
– Finally, he added an oval blue frame and these words: “Happy Holidays!” “Francine & Frank” and “Chicago 2003.”
This editing process took just 45 minutes, and Frank said you don’t have to be a graphic designer to do what he did. All digital cameras come with basic photo-editing tools that let users easily manipulate images.
Frank handed off the completed digital image to Francine, who pointed her Web browser to CardStore.com.
And in another hour, about 100 cards were ready for printing.
Francine had uploaded her list of card recipients from Microsoft Outlook to CardStore.com last year (instructions are on the site), so simply “eyeballed the list and decided who I want to add or remove,” she said.
She used the Redhead Piano Bar photo for the front of the card and pasted a Christmas letter-type message on the inside.
CardStore.com does the rest: The company prints the final cards, addresses the envelopes (you pick the font), stamps them (you pick which stamp) and mails them (on the day that you pick).
The cost?
“About $1.79 per card, plus postage,” Francine said. “But it gets a lot cheaper the more you send. We only sent about 100 cards.”
Still, Francine said, that’s less than the cost of most non-customized holiday cards.
More Top Picks Best Phonics Programs For Dyslexic Kids Compared
———-
Contact [email protected].