Weddingbee

I had a few people ask how I made our save the dates, so I thought I would provide some tutorials. First up is how to put the image together in Photoshop. I am using Photoshop 7.0 for Windows. Other versions should be fairly similar, but menu items may not be in the same locations.

First, start a new file and make the dimensions fairly large. I made mine 2000 x 2000.

Then, I found a graphic to use for the background and made a pattern. This option is located under Edit > Define Pattern. A dialogue box will pop up allowing you to name the new pattern.

The pattern will be located in your pattern menu. To access this, choose the Fill tool (the one that looks like a bucket). Then choose to fill with a Pattern and select the new pattern you just created.

Then click in your blank file to have the pattern fill it repeatedly.

The next part is a little tricky. Select All (Select > All or Ctrl-A) and Copy (Edit > Copy or Ctrl-C). Then open a new document that is the size you want your save the date to be. Ours was 800 x 571.

Paste (Edit > Paste or Ctrl-V) the pattern you copied. Then choose Edit > Transform > Scale and use the boxes that appear in the corners of the document to scale it down to the size you want. Hold the Shift key so the aspect ratio will not change. This is how I made the pattern appear centered.

Here’s a shot after the pattern was scaled down.

To create the white box with rounded corners, I just drew in a rounded rectangle with a radius of 0.75 inches.

To create the border around it, make sure your Layers window is open. (If it isn’t, you can open it by going to Window > Layers.) Then right click on the layer of the rounded rectangle and choose “Blending Options”. The dialogue pictured below will appear. To get the red border that glows, I used “Outer Glow”. If you want a solid line, “Stroke” works well, and you could also add a Drop Shadow here. You can play around with these till you find something you like.

Then I just pasted in our Miis, again using Edit > Transform > Scale to scale them to the correct sizes.

And then used the text tool for the text.

It may be probable to do something similar in Adobe Illustrator, but I only have Photoshop, so I wouldn’t be much help.

Now that you have an image file for your electronic save the dates, you need to send it in an HTML email. This will ensure that your image appears in the message body, and not just as an attachment.

Mrs. Daffodil already has a great tutorial for using Outlook, so for this tutorial we’ll be using Mozilla Thunderbird, which you can download free.

To set your email to be sent as HTML, choose Options > Format > Rich Text (HTML) Only.

Then click the image menu to insert your image into the email.

Choose the image you want to use and add some alternate text. Many people block images in their email, so we put “Please view this image!” as well as the text from our save the date. Also, choose to attach the image to the message.

Under the ‘Link’ tab, you can enter the link to your wedding website. This will lead anyone who clicks on the image straight to your page.

After the image was pasted, we centered it in the email, but you can format it anyway you like.

Then, just enter the email addresses you want to send it to, and it’s off!

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