The Photographic Calendar Service Comparison
Catalina Martinez
There are three different ways to make your own photo calendar. If you have many photo prints which you prefer to stick onto paper and if you want to add hand drawn images, an old style pre-printed calendar template will still be useful. More versatile and interesting is making photographic calendars through software, and the result looks most professional when printed by a proper photo service. For this you normally have to use the software which the (online) photolab provides (usually) for free.
Hints for your photographic calendar design
No more sticky photo corners If you want to create a calender with hand drawings or pre-digital photographs simply buy a pre-printed calendar from an office supply to stick the prints in. If your images are digital you will get much more and better results using editing software like "FotoInsight Designer", "Printing-1" or "greenstreet Art&Craft". To make the calendar look professional use only one large photo per page and keep backgrounds in classic white or black.
Templates All the three calendar options described here offer a variety of templates, so that the area for photos can be maximised or more room can be given for notes on the calendar. Digitally designing a calendar also allows to save and re-use the design as a template. That way the calendar for Granny can easily be changed to make another variant for an Uncle...
Birthdays Creating calendars with digital images in calendar design software makes it easy to insert passport-type images with birthdays. With image editing programes the exact date can be written onto the image and this can be reused year after year. As the photo calendar applications described here allow to start a calendar any month of the year, this also makes calendars a very personal birthday present.
Image editing Today digital cameras can produce more pixels than necessary. 200 ppi (pixel per inch in the corresponding size) are sufficient, and jpegs can be smaller than 1.5 MB. For images which don't have to fill a full page jpegs of half a Megabyte usually suffice. Those who favour Photoshop, Fireworks or similar applications can create whole page images in their photo editing software and impose them as a full page (set as background) into their photo calendar.
What is the best way to design a photo calendar? If you want to design, print and bind the complete calendar in your own home, you will enjoy calendar software like the "Art&Craft Calendars&Diaries" from greenstreet - http://greenstreet-online.com/offers/iitm-calendar/ . This also allows to freely choose special papers, even when this may be more expensive in the end. If you want to create a thick photobook calendar with many notes and pictures you should choose Printing-1. By far the best desk top and wall calendars come clearly from some of the online photo services like FotoInsight.
We have run a photo calendar test of the three leading services. Find a summary of the results here: http://www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/article/default.aspx?objid=51027
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About The Author
Catalina Martinez is the mother of two children. She has lived in America and Europe and frequently writes about photography, digital art, software, the Internet, nutrition and yoga.
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