You may already have much of what is used to begin creating uniquely personalized gifts for occasions you provide gifts within your computer equipment. The designing and creation of custom presents can be done through utilizing your computer, its RAM (preferably 1GB), a quality graphic video card, a graphic software program (Adobe Photoshop,Paint Shop Pro, Photo Impact, Corel Draw ect.), camera, photos, printer, scanner, additional peripheral hardware devices, and regular computer updates and maintenance. Let me break down these components a bit more, detailing how they come into play so you may better determine your capabilities.
Each computer will have built within it some sort of graphic video card and initial amount of RAM (random access memory). The RAM may be shared or not, but, provides ability for your computer to open programs and update data through an alternative to the HD which speeds things up, unless the allocated RAM is less than the demands being made on it to quickly display operations being conducted through all that may be currently running within the background. Most computers presently sold, house at least 512MB RAM. 1GB is double that, and more preferable for running graphic software programs and the graphics created that may be around 10 MB a piece themselves. Having 1GB of RAM should suffice well in the graphic design projects produced. 512MB, may even do well, pending the assortment of anti-virus, spyware, utilities constantly running, and the amount of various other programs open while you work (Outlook, IE,MS Word, ect.). If your computer tends to be sluggish, and you have conducted regularly the computer maintenance recommended for your hardware and software, an upgrade of your RAM may be well advised for faster processing.
There are several Graphic Imaging Software Programs available, that consist of varying levels of complexity, and capabilities of manipulation, as well as price, and preference. I mention here those I have used, and only my own personal opinions of them, as I am by no means an expert user of any one, but rather a user of several depending the effects I am trying to obtain. Nearly all graphic designing software allows some sort of trial period to experiment before purchasing, which I highly recommend. Many computers when purchased, include image software already installed such as MS Picture It Express, Adobe Photo Deluxe, or Ulead Photo Impact bundle. As well, any additional peripheral hardware such as pen tablets, printers and scanners usually have image editing software included such as Adobe Photo Album, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter Essentials, or Color Efex Pro. While these are usually basic starter samples of what may be done through graphic imagery, they are a great lead into further trials of more advanced software programs. There are free tutorial lessons and communities for in-depth learning, techniques, and processes of many image software. Some are listed on our Image Editing Software Links Page that I am familiar and recommend for those just beginning.
My experience includes Ulead Photo Impact (5 Bundled Edition), Adobe Photo Deluxe, and MS Picture It, which were the first image editing software I was exposed, as they came on a computer purchased. I played around with them, followed tutorials I was able to search out, and mainly corrected 35 mm photos at that time. As time and exposure brought more available and affordable software into the general publics' reach, I purchased Paint Shop Pro. At that time, it allowed more manipulation and creativity than the software included on my computer already, quite affordably, since I was not able to justify the purchase price of the more professional Adobe products geared to experienced graphic designers at the onset of my learning. As my knowledge increased and more and more sites were created to teach and provide lessons for graphic software programs, I acquired many of Adobe's product line, as well as Macromedia's, and presently incorporate several various programs into my artworks. For those whom have desire to learn and create their own original artwork and graphic design, I highly suggest Corel's Paint Shop Pro (formerly Jasc's Paint Shop Pro) due to the ease, cost, and abundance of learning tools and tutorials freely distributed.
Although any and all photographs can be enhanced and manipulated through image editing software, obviously, the better the camera; the better the final image you have to work with. With today's technology, and declining prices of that advanced technology, quality image photographs that you own all copyrights to are the perfect personalization tool for numerous gift ideas. You can not get much more "personal" than actual, real photos of the person, place or event depicting the individual. So many items can be created with photos from the past and present telling their own story, touching special depths of fondness and memories. If you are already an active picture-taker, you probably have eons of material to work with. Even the less-than-perfect photos may have a subject or background that may be able to be cut-out or incorporated into another image producing quite unique design. If you have not already been snapping photos of everything in sight, you may find some new and useful ideas as to why you may want to begin doing so now, as I share my "photo frenzy" ways with you.
Many times we attempt to capture our subjects within the perfect light and setting, which is wonderful when it does turn out that way, but how about all those settings, subjects, sceneries, and situations where they are less-desirable or plain? They too can be very useful in our creating the unique personalized gifts. If our subjects facial features or expression captured at the moment is a bit "off' or goofy, or if the exposure is not quite what we were hoping for, these shots can still make wonderful humorous, and unique background images for printing cards, caricatures, stationery, t-shirts, wall hangings and so much more. Because I do so enjoy creating the most unique gifts for all I give, I am constantly taking pictures of foods, flowers, scenery, items, animals, and friends and relatives in every capacity, to manipulate those pictures into something else as a final gift. I link to a few examples here. My philosophy is, there are no throw-away photos, even though only a particular area within a photo may be used of the whole.
If you are using a digital camera, and have the ability to set the pictures to be formatted/saved as .tiff images rather than .jpg; this will allow for the best detailed images without compression, but will also allow less pictures per memory card before filling it up. You also need to decide your preferred resolution setting for pixels per inch/dots per inch (ppi/dpi). Again the larger the setting, the greater the image quality, but also the larger the file, and less pics able to be stored on your card. Because I do use photographs as my main graphic images in creating my gifts, I do save all images as .tiff files at 1984x1488 resolution and have a few memory cards (128MB as that is the largest available for my camera) I use. Once the memory card is filled, I transfer all images to DVDs for storage, as to not fill up the Hard Drive. If you have the ability to do the same, and prefer to not lose any detail within your photo through the loss in .jpg compression, I highly suggest you do the same. A high-quality, high-resolution print-out will result which keeps its quality of detail when re-sizing and reducing, as opposed to attempting to enlarge an image for an 8.5x14 printout for example, that had been a small .jpg file originally to save room. To sum up this section, may it suffice to say, if you are interested in having a large library of images of which to choose for that personalized gift, depicting favorites of the individual..... keep that shutter clicking!
With technological advancements, today's ink jet printers, and photo printers are creating better quality image results, and can be used to produce many high quality graphics and photo images to be used on personalized gifts. The quality of the print depends on the ink type, and print settings available/used for the final print out. Dye inkjet printing inks are water soluable based and less resistant to UV light, while pigment injet inks adhere better to the surface, are oil/solvent based, and more fade resistant, thus better but higher expense inkjet printers. The ink is either applied through dot application, (one pass printing) or continuous inking (four pass printing) on the photo printers. Printer settings will effect the final outcome of the image through the pre-set dpi or dots per inch the printer applies. Default settings are usually 300dpi, but to obtain higher quality image printout, dithering and halftones; manually these may be set to 600dpi up to as much as 1200 or more dpi, resulting in at least 4800x1200 optimized dpi. Again, the larger the numbers, the larger the file and memory required to complete the task. Refer to your printer product manual for details on your model's available settings.
One particular printer on the market utilizes edible inks in cartridges for printing out photos, graphic images and text onto edible wafer paper used on cakes and cookies. The wafer paper is set upon the icing and semi-dissolves into the icing, leaving a high quality color photo image reproduction as the decoration. Canon's earlier Bubblejet series acommodates these and is used by some for creating their personalized cakes and cookies gifts. This type of printing apparatus needs to remain in addition to other preferred printers, as there is no acceptable method to clean and change cartridges/nozzels for varying type ink usage. These are some of my favorite gifts to create, and really, the investment in such a printer for this purpose is very reasonable, IMHO.
Laser printers use toner similar to a copy machine and produce crisp, quality black/white text print, but have yet come to the quality level in the color laser printers to that of inkjet printers. The initial investment of laser printing is higher, but cartridge replacement costs per output is much less expensive than inkjet inks. Anticipated quality color image photo printing via color laser printers is on the horizon, but still a bit beyond most hand-crafters reach. If you do have access to both inkjet and laser printers, I suggest as I do; use the inkjet for all color photo graphic imaging, and then the laser printer for adding text material - that way you have as high a quality result as possible.
For all those pictures taken from earlier days gone by, and shared from other family members, scanners allow us to save and use them just as if they came directly off the memory card. Our hand drawn etchings, and kids drawing masterpieces are able to be saved and put on disk by scanning them as well.
Scanners also have varying settings for both the resolution of output (usually as ppi) and also the RGB (red green blue) color bit (8/16/24/32/48) as well as web safe colors, greyscale, and lineart. Essentially, every scanner has some sort of image editing software associated within the pre-scan and scanning processes to adjust color gamma, red eye, bright/contrast, filters and descreening for print output type (newspaper, magazine, art magazine).
In graphic image creation, there are often additional peripheral devices employed in unique design techniques such as paint and draw tools. These are either vector or raster image creation. An example of the vector imaging design peripheral device would be the pen tablets that have been taken from the original pen plotter days of the 60's. A pen tablet uses both the cordless mouse and pen to draw images onto the tablet, that then appear on the computer monitor screen. I am not very knowlegable of these at this time, as I have just recently begun playing with mine, so am still experimenting with cause and effect.
Whether creating personalized gifts or not, it is imperative that regularly scheduled maintenance be done with your computer to keep it at its optimal performance level. This is especially true when using/creating large graphic photo files, or file sizes of any substantial size, by a computer getting bogged down in speed and performance due to fragmented files, full cache, errors from moving and copying files and folders, need for updated drivers and program and security updates, as well as anti-virus definitions. The importance of computer maintenance and performance optimization has earned this section a page all of its own which will also provide links to programs, utilities, software, sites and recommended routine scheduling for all computer owner/operators that will be linked here.