Here’s a recent example of a cereal box birthday invitation for a 2 year old. For this one I tried using the at-a-glance icons at the top of the box to give the important facts (time, date, place).

Most of the work on the original picture was to extract it from the background.
On top of that, I mainly lightened up most of it, and then did some dodge & burn painting. I also painted much of the glow in the background to make it more irregular-shaped, and not just an even glow all around her body.
You can see a larger version of the final result here: Nouncement Gallery.

When I take things to get printed, they want to have an 1/8″ border around the image, because with full-bleed printing, you can’t expect the printer and the cutting to be exactly accurate. I could just add a step at the end of my process inside Photoshop to make the image 1/8″ bigger on all sides, but then I would have to fill in that “moat” with some color, using the clone tool, or some other way. I like the idea of having the border there all the time, but just covering it up with a mask that’s about the same color as the window background, so it’s barely noticeable. That way, when you move or scale a picture so part of it is off the edge of frame, it will be preserved in that border area. It is probably easier to make a pixel/raster version of that mask, but for the sake of keeping the memory footprint down, I wanted to do it with a vector shape (actually 1 big one the size of the whole image, and one slightly smaller subtracting from it).

I wrote 2 scripts to help with this issue. One to add the border to any image, and another to take it off, for the case of gallery pictures and the like.

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