Sports Card Project

By and © 2005 Clara Wallace – Matter Of Scrap Scrapbooking Graphics

Here’s a fun project that can be used for a variety of situations. We’ll be making a simple sports card featuring your favorite baseball player. You can print these out several to a sheet to hand out to the team and sports fans (like Grandma and Grandpa)! Remember that you can do your own designs – this is just a really basic design that begs to be customized. If you don’t have any sports guys/gals in your family, this project would definitely work for new babies, school pics and basically anything else!

This tutorial is written with Photoshop Elements 4 but will work using other image-editing programs.

You will need a sports photo that you want to use for the baseball card, or any photo.

1. First, open a new document and set the size to 2.5inches wide and 3.5inches tall. That is the standard card size. You can (of course) make your card any size you like. Make sure your card is 300dpi if you want to print it out and set the background to white.

Now choose a color using the color picker. Fill the background with this color – ALT+BACKSPACE.

2. You have your sports photo open, right? We’re going to use the CROP TOOL to crop our sports photo. With the CROP TOOL selected (hit “C” on your keyboard for the shortcut or look for the tenth icon down in the TOOL PALETTE) you are going to type in “2.5 in” for the width and “3.5 in” for the height and 300dpi for the resolution in the settings at the top bar (see fig. 2).

Now, drag out where you want to crop. Don’t worry if you don’t position the crop area in the exact place. The area that you will be cropping out will be shadowed – just move your mouse around and position the selected area where you want it. You can still adjust the size of the area to be cropped by dragging the corner handles. When you are ready, click on the green checkmark to CROP.

3. Now we’ll move our photo to our card. Hit “V” on your keyboard for the MOVE TOOL. Click on the photo and drag your photo over to your card. You can hold down the SHIFT KEY while you drag and when you let go of your mouse key, your photo will end up smack dab in the center of your card!

4. We’re going to now use the COOKIE CUTTER TOOL to cut away the edges of our photo. See fig. 3 if you need help. Select the COOKIE CUTTER TOOL. Choose the set of CROPPING SHAPES and pick one you like. I used CROP SHAPE #29.

Starting near the top left corner of your photo, drag out the shape. When you let go, you’ll see the outlines of where your photo will be cut away. Position the shape where you want it. You might have to use the right and left arrow keys to nudge it around.

When it’s where you want it, hit ENTER. Now your card will look like this:

5. Now we’ll just add a couple of shapes at the bottom to put our text on.

Make a new layer. Select a color in the color picker, perhaps one of the team colors. Using the MARQUEE TOOL (hit “M”) drag out a rectangle along the bottom, big enough to type in the team name and player's name. Let go of the mouse and ALT+BACKSPACE to fill with color. Now, deselect to get rid of the marquee CTRL+D.

Your card should now look similar to this:

6. We’re ready to put in the text. Hit “T” for the TYPE TOOL. Type your text in. I put the team name in the rectangle. Add in the player’s name, date and anything else you want to include. Here’s my final card.

You can save your unflattened file as a PSD to use as a template. To change the photo, just follow start at step 2 with a new photo and change the names/text.

Have fun with this – use different cropping shapes as well as different shapes for the text background.

Clara Wallace is the owner and designer at Matter Of Scrap Digital Scrapbooking and is active in the digital scrapbooking community. She has been a featured artist in Simple Scrapbooks Digital Scrapbooking 5 and her designs and layouts in the book, Digital Scrapbooking in Easy Steps.