Create Free Greeting Card Background With Photoshop CS 3 [Guide

Greeting cards hold much significance in communicating emotions to your loved ones. They become more special if they are designed exclusively. Creating greeting cards in Photoshop is fun. It lets you to show your creativity with which you want to convey your message to your loved ones. While creating greeting cards background is very important. Today my idea is based on how to make a background of a greeting card. You can further experiment with the given idea to show your own creativity. Let’s create a colorful background which will look perfect with thegreeting card.

I am going to create this background in Photoshop cs3. The resulting document will contain only two layers, and the tools we are going to use are brushes, Gaussian blur and shape blur.

Create a new document in photoshop. Keep it as large or small as you wish. Now take the brush tool and set its parameters. Open the brush engine by pressing F5. Choose the soft brush of about 15 pixels. Now leave all the settings to the default except the following ones. Change them as given

Brush Tip Shape:

• · Size = 15 px
• · Spacing = 60%

Shape dynamics:

• · Minimum roundness = 100%

Scattering:

• · Scatter = 0%
• · Control = pen pressure
• · Count =1
• · Count jitter=100%

Along with these settings, also check the option of Smoothing. Now take a new layer. Pick the Pen Tool from the tool bar and draw a straight line path. Pick the Path Selection Tool. Keep the background color to white, right click the path and click Stroke Path. Select brush and check the option of Simulate Pressure. Press ok to exit the dialog box. Now changing the brush size repeat the process two times more. The resulting image you will get will be like this:

Now duplicate these layers to create random or any specific pattern. I have created the following pattern. Select all the layers by holding down the ctrl key and press ctrl + E to merge the layers. Now we will apply Gaussian blur to it. Go to Filter > Blur and select Gaussian Blur. Give Gaussian Blur of 2 pixels. You will get the following result.

Change the Blending Mode of the layer to Soft Light. Double click it to open the layer styles. We will apply the layer style of Gradient Overlay. Select any gradient from the default ones or create your own new gradient. Apply it on the layer. Now again go to Filter > Blur and select Shape Blur. In Shape Blur select the shape of Diamond Card. This will give a slight abstract look to the background.

Now apply the layer mask by clicking on the Add Layer Mask button located at the bottom of the layer panel. Keeping white as background color, take the soft brush of about 150 pixels and mark daubs at the bottom of the image. This can be a place for your text.

Now as a final touch I have just used a round brush, and mark its daubs by lowering its opacity. The background is ready now. You can experiment further by adding text and applying different layer styles.