Animated Mother's Day E-Card Craft With Photoshop Software

There are many e-card companies on the Internet that will allow to personalize one of their stock animated e-cards. However, you can easily make your own animated Mother's Day e-card in a few minutes using Photoshop and Adobe's Image ready.

1. Open a new document, choosing the size you'd like. A good size for e-cards is between 500 - 600 pixels in height and 400 - 500 pixels in width. Choose a background color that will compliment the color of the image that you plan on choosing.

2. Double click the layer icon (it is in the tray on the right hand side menu if you are using the default settings). Place a check mark next to Gradient Overlay, and adjust the gradient to show a wide spectrum.

3. Open the custom shape tool and pick an image. You can choose from hearts, flowers, abstract images, stars, and other fun shapes. Try to choose an image which will have some sort of personal meaning for your mother. Place the image on top of your background.

4. Double click the layer icon for your image and modify you image to appear 3-D using a variety of choices including shadows and/or embossing.

5. Next use the Text tool to write your Mother's Day message. Be creative and fit the text to the image.

6. You can play with the image more by adding masks and additional layers to create special effects.

7. When you are finished creating your image, send the image to Image Ready either through the File menu or through the icon located on the bottom of the tray on the left of your screen.

8. When Image Ready opens, make sure Animation is checked under the Window menu.

9. In the Image Ready program, duplicate your image using the Duplicate Current Frame button in the Animation tray. It's usually good to have at least 10-12 duplicate images when animating and e-card.

10. Go through your layers making only one visible for each frame while hiding the others. For instance: Frame 1 should only have Image 1 visible, Frame 2 should have only Image 2 visible, and so on....

11. Next, select all of the frames. There should be a tint arrow under the last frame. Click the arrow and choose the animation speed. Anywhere from 0.2 - 0.8 should work, Experiment until you find the speed that you like best.

12. Using the Optimize tray, select Format as GIF and adjust the Color Table. Make sure No Dither is chosen and Transparency and add Metadata is checked.

13. Go to file/save as and save your Mother's Day e-card as a Save Optimized As

14. Save your e-card to your computer or upload it to the internet using a free image hosting service, such as Photobucket.

15. Send the e-card to your mother and make her Mother's Day extra special!

Photobucket. www.photobucket.com