Weddingbee

While lounging on my parents’ couch last week, taking advantage of the free room and board, tons of DVDs and amazing food, I was reading a copy of Time magazine and saw an ad for Making the Cover. It’s a free program that let’s you create your own magazine cover.

It’s really easy to use (although the site ran a bit slow for me–that might just be my new internet connection, though). I had to crop our photo so it was more-or-less square, as the program can’t crop on its own. But that’s easy to do in MS Paint:

1.Use the tool that looks like a rectangle made of dashes to outline the part of your photo you want to capture.
2.Choose Edit >>Cut, then choose File>>New. When it asks if you want to save changes to your original, click ‘no’ so it leaves your file intact.
3.On your new, blank ‘canvas’ Go to Tools>>Stretch/Skew, and on *both* the horizontal and vertical stretch, change the “100″ to “10″. Then close that tool.
4.Your blank canvas should now be tiny. Then choose Edit>>Paste, and your cropped image should appear.
5.Choose File>>Save As, and save the picture. Then upload it when you get to that step in the Making the Cover program.

I’m not pretending to be super computer savvy, so I don’t know that that’s the best method of image manipulation, but it works for me :).

Also, the site only offers a couple of pretty hokey headlines, so I just did mine without. But it would be cool if someone (who has PSP or Photoshop, maybe?) could do a transparent-background overlay of text, with a cute headline like “Couple of the Year.” I tried to do it in MS Paint, but the only way to add text in Paint is to have it on a solid, white background…not very polished looking for these purposes.

And here is my finished cover:

In short, the program could have definitely been a lot cooler, but since it’s free I can’t complain too much. You will need other skills to really personalize your project, though–adding text, or even the date.

Ideas for using this:
~Save-the-dates (with the date in the corner being your future wedding date, and info. on the reverse side)
~With a “Wedding of the Year” headline and the couple’s wedding photo, these could be cute thank-you postcards or follow-up cards
~Bachelor or bachelorette party invites

I hope this is useful to someone!

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