Print your own Christmas cards

If you are like me, you want to send out custom holiday cards with your own photos but often times you find yourself too busy to bother. If you’ve tried it and had horrible results, then you aren’t alone either!

Fortunately, my friends at Red River Paper are experts on this subject and have done an incredible job of providing user education on this topic for use with their papers and envelopes. It’s really the one stop shop no matter if you are using Canon, Epson, or HP papers with just about any software that you can imagine (for both Mac & PC)!!!

I’ve been a fan of Red River Paper for a couple of years and have featured their products on my printing series page, but honestly I’ve never tried their greeting card products – until now. Admittedly, I was very intimidated by this whole process because I’ve had horrific results in the past when I tried to do it all solo. What’s worse, is that I often found myself without paper that could be printed on both sides (especially Luster paper), so I was never really able to do what I wanted. In the end I had to resort to throwing out my hard work and just picking up cards from a discount store. This left me both frustrated and dissatisfied.

How much will it cost to print my card?

Click here to get an estimate from Red River Paper about how much it cost to do your own cards. In most cases, it’s typically under $1 per card.

Templates & Videos (Mac & PC – Aperture, Lightroom, Photoshop, Elements & more…)

Click here to learn more both in written and video form about how to do your own cards in both vertical and horizontal orientation for Canon, Epson, and HP printers using most of the popular photo editing software for both the Mac & PC.

My Experience

I have Canon iPF6450, PRO-1, PRO-10, and Epson R3000, 3880, and 4900 printers on hand, but I quickly discovered that the 3880 was the best printer for the job due its easy support for custom paper sizes. The paper I was using was 7x10 so that eliminated my printers that didn’t support custom size papers (the PRO series printers). I had no desire to do this on my 6450, so that left the Epson’s. The 3880 is the sheet paper king, so I decided to go with it.

While Red River Paper has instructions for Mac and PC with a variety of software, I decided to stay in my comfort zone and print from Photoshop CC on my Windows 7 PC. You can see my Photoshop settings and how I printed above and below.

Here’s my printer driver settings using the Red River paper profile for my test paper (temporarily not for sale):

To keep my settings handy, I created a custom setting called “Red River 7x10 Card”. This won’t exist on your printer, so don’t go looking for it.

The template was handy and I managed to print on both the inside and outside without any problem. I did heed the warning that you should print your inside text first and save your photos on the outside for the second pass through the printer.

For my test prints I did leave high speed (bi-directional) printing on and it seemed to be okay. I also didn’t wait any time before flipping the paper and printing both sides, but I managed to insert the paper in the wrong way – twice!!! This was carelessness on my part, so a heads up that you really need to pay attention when reloading your paper! I chose the sheet feeder since that was the only one that the driver would allow me to use a custom size.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to test borderless because my driver complained that I had to use a supported size if I wanted borderless.

Overall it worked great and I’m thrilled with the results. The scored groove made folding super easy, so my results look like they came from a pro print shop – just what I wanted! Here’s a snapshot photo of how my card turned out (colors displayed inaccurately due to photo of a print):

Test Card - Outside

Test Card - Inside

Conclusion

Overall, I’m happy enough that I plan to do all my cards on my own this year. Heck, I may even get creative and start doing my promo cards and create some fine art cards too! I’m also thrilled that I don’t have to cut the paper or fight to get the perfect fold thanks to the pre-scoured fold groove.

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