Printing Tips

Getting The Most Out Of Your Printables

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Printing Your Material If You Live In The USA...

The kits are automatically set to print on standard (UK) A4-sized paper or lightweight card. If you would like to print the material out on USA letter-sized paper:

1. Open the file you wish to print.

2. Go to File > Page Setup

3. Click on the 'Paper Size' drop-down menu and select 'US Letter'.

4. Click OK

Then you're all set to print out your material on USA letter-sized paper! (To print, go to File > Print )

Printing Tips From Visitors To
Making-Handmade-Cards.com

Emma Says:

I print my backing papers on Tesco's Finest Premium Paper... it gives a brilliant finish.

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Jackie Says:

I never use paint - I use Piccassa - but good advice given for ALL programmes - THANKS, Keep up the good work.

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Gill Says:

Try printing on parchment style paper, it has a slight texture, and I have found the results have always been excellent. Also lightweight calligraphy paper (sometimes called practice paper) gives a very good finish. I always use this type of paper for my inserts. As you say, Claire, it pays to use good quality paper. Vellum is also great but I found I sometimes needed to tweak the settings a bit to get the right saturation.

I have to say that I have failed miserably to print on acetate, even though I bought good quality from a print shop. The ink just failed to dry, whatever I did with the settings. So instead, I layer the acetate over the paper printed design, to give a different effect.

[Note from Claire: Fab tips Gill! By the way, printers can't print on the general, cheap type of acetate you use for overhead projectors. You need to use acetate specifically for printers. As a general rule, like paper and ink, the better quality the inkjet acetate, the better quality your printout. You get what you pay for.]

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Laura Says:

Having got my BRILL pack of printables yesterday, I've saved them all to CDs for security as you suggested... don't want to lose them! Just to make life easier, I've saved all the Christmas printables to one CD and the others to a different CD.

As I have printable CDs, I've printed a snap shot of samples from each kit onto to top of the CDs. This means that whenever I need a particular style backing paper or button etc, I can see at a glance which CD I need! And, just so I don't forget your web address, I've printed that on them too!

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Christine Says:

I am a big fan of printables, I have more than 5,000 backing papers and toppers etc and use them all the time. I do also use compatible inks and find I get the same or very near the same quality of print out as I do with the manufacturers inks. I say try them and see what you think, you'll be surprised.

Thank you for the tutorial it was very informative.

[Note from Claire: Thanks Christine for the tip. But just a warning to everyone! As I mentioned in the video, it does depend on the printer you have, but for manufacturers, using ink other than their own brand (or accepted brands) will nullify your guarantee or warranty. So it's definitely worth checking your printer documentation or checking with the manufacturer about where they stand on this, before putting a non-branded ink cartridge in your printer.]

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More Tips From Claire

- Another tip which I forgot to mention in the video - if you want to go all out and use photo paper, try using 'matt' photo paper. No gloss - but really professional finish, especially if you set your printer to a high quality print setting.

- Don't forget to go into your 'maintenance' tab and clean your printer heads when you start seeing lines across your printables. It just means they need a clean. But don't do it unless you have to because it can use up quite a bit of ink.

- If you don't have Windows Photo Gallery, don't worry. Your printer will probably have a similar function where you can print out half the size, a quarter of the size etc (remember it's all shrunk though). I explain how my printer does this in the video (when I get to 'Page Layout' and talk about the 'multi-page' function). In the video I was using Windows Vista.

- Everyone who has Windows should be able to find Paint on their computer (because it comes with Windows). If you want to keep the size of the design but just want to crop the sheet before printing it (as opposed to shrinking the whole thing), you can crop it in Paint. Go to the start menu (colourful button on bottom left of your screen > Programs > Accessories > Paint.

- Don't forget everyone that once your printouts aren't looking 100% (i.e. lines through it etc), go to your printer settings and **clean your printer head nozzles or align the printer heads** as I show you in the video. Your printouts shouldn't have lines through it.

- At the time of recording the video, my printer is a Epson Stylus DX8400. It's a cheap printer (I don't use the scanner that comes with it). I guess many people might be surprised that my main printer is a cheap one. But the way I see it, most of my readers / visitors / subscribers aren't going to have very expensive printer. And I want to make sure that my printables look just as good using a cheap printer. So that's why I use one! And I can safely say that the Epson Stylus DX8400 does do lovely print outs. But I must emphasise that I only use Epson ink with it. I believe you can get my printer from Amazon here...

- To save on ink, I only use that printer (above) to print my card making printables and photos. That way, I only use the Epson branded ink for the things I really need good quality for. I have another (different) cheap printer too, with which I use cheap ink with (non-branded), which I tend to print other things on (e.g. letters etc - things that don't need to look so good or need so much detail or color precision).

- Generally, it's best to avoid thin paper when printing full sheets, as it can get a 'rippled' look. So it's always a good idea to use a good quality paper.

- I haven't tried printing on card that's heavier than 160gsm - but I can say that it prints nicely on that weight.

- Quite a few of our designers tend to use 100gsm or 120gsm paper for printing our digital papers, and use 160gsm to 210gsm card stock, depending on their personal preference.

Printing Tips Transcript

Hi everyone, I'm Claire from Making-Handmade-Cards.com, and this is a little video to give you some printing tips to get the most out of your printables.

Now if you're like me and just love your crafting supplies, then you can never have enough. And for me, I really like to have variety. I like to have a huge selection of backing papers and images at my fingertips.

Now I've been thinking about why that is - why is it that us crafters like to have a huge selection at our fingertips? Is it because we're greedy?

Well, possibly! ;o)

But I think moreover it's because, if you've got lots of different backing papers and images in front of you, then it gives you more inspiration, there are a lot more creative options and you don't feel limited by having such a small choice.

I mean let's face it, if you're a crafter I think you'll probably agree with me that crafting can become quite an expensive hobby. I know it did for me! And that kind of took the fun out of crafting at some points.

Thankfully card-making supplies have moved forward in the past few years and you can now get multi-packs of backing papers, tags and image embellishments, all bound in a little book. And because it's a multi-pack of papers, you can save money.

The only thing I found, was that I didn't necessarily like all the papers so I wouldn't use them all. And that meant that I'd end up wasting money and they'd end up somewhere taking up space in my craft supply box.

The other option I had, was to buy individual sheets, which again, is very exciting because you can mix and match. But it did tend to be expensive that way.

And then, of course, all of this stuff that I'd buy would take up so much room. I have an already very crammed house - my house is just bursting and my craft supplies have just slowly expanded into various rooms of the house. It's slowly started to invade it, to be honest! I'm sure that many of you crafters can identify with that!

So what I wanted to kind of do, was find a way around all this. And because I was keeping an eye on the pennies and how much I was spending - because this hobby can become expensive, I started to feel guilty when I wanted to use a backing paper, or an image, or a tag from one of these individual papers or booklets that I'd bought.

I'd just start to feel guilty because I'd think, 'Do you know, it's cost me that. Do I really want to use it on this card?'

It was taking all the fun out of it really. Especially if they were one of my favourites. You know, often crafters say there are so many beautiful things, that you want to buy one set of papers to look at and stroke, and another set to actually use!

But come on, that's just way too expensive. We can't do that! So I just didn't want to feel guilty when I used a backing paper or a topper and that's why I turned to printables.

Printable backing papers, printable images and printable tags - these solved a lot of the frustrations that I had. For one, they were a lot more cost effective for me. I'd buy them once and I'd use them forever.

And that's the great thing about it...

You can buy a printable once and that's it. You've got it to use again and again and again.

And what's great is that as you start collecting these printable kits, printable backing papers, toppers, sentiments and images, you actually get to grow a really huge library of printables. And you can either keep them on your computer, or you can just burn them to a CD and then just take out the CD whenever you want.

That, for me, was brilliant because all of a sudden I didn't feel guilty if I printed out a paper. And I was actually saving money in the long-run.

People think, 'Oh but the ink is expensive... blah blah blah'. But you only print out the sheet that you want to use.

Beforehand I'd go out and buy a multi-pack of papers. Great, I'd get loads of papers. But some of the money I'd spent on it was wasted because I wouldn't use all those papers. Plus those papers would be taking up room in my already crammed house!

Whereas with the printables, I'd literally open up my computer and print out the sheets I'd want to print out as and when I wanted to use them.

You don't print out every single sheet in your kit, you just print out what you want to use at the time.

So when you think about it from that perspective, you're not actually wasting lots of ink. And you're actually saving on space as well because you're literally just printing out what you need.

Another thing I started doing with the printable backing papers is that I would print out just half a sheet (or less) to save on ink. I'll show you how to do that in this video...

But I did have one reservation and it was a pretty big reservation because I wanted my cards to look good. I wanted my cards to have the 'wow' factor: I wanted people to look at one of my cards and go, 'Wow, that's stunning!' And my one reservation was, could my printer give me the quality of printouts that I need to make these stunning cards?

And that spurred me on to explore just what my printer could do, and it really helped me to get the best out of my printables.

Now, bear in mind that today's printers can print photos. So most printers' printouts are of beautiful quality. And today's printers have got cheaper and cheaper too, so it's affordable to get a new one.

There are lots of printing tips that I've picked up along the way so I'd like to share with you in this video...

Use Good Quality Paper

My results have really depended on the type of paper I've used.

The better quality the paper, the better quality the printout of my backing paper, tag, image or sentiment.

But mostly, I just use inkjet paper, not photo paper! I don't think I've ever printed backing papers onto photo paper actually. I've always used plain inkjet paper and I've found that's actually done a good enough job!

I do use good quality inkjet paper because you can obviously get different quality of types of paper.

I know other people who print their papers onto photo paper. Of course, they have found that their printout are even more stunning.

But you don't need to use posh paper! I just use simple inkjet paper and make sure that the inkjet paper is of a good quality.

Using 'Windows Photo Gallery'

First, let's open Windows Photo Gallery. If you have Windows Vista, click on the Start button, go to 'All Programs' and then double click on 'Windows Photo Gallery'.

So here we are, in Windows Photo Gallery. As you can see, that's what it says here (at the top of my screen).

I've opened up sheet #3 from the Floral Doodle eKit...

So click on the arrow next to the 'Print' button and press 'Print'.

I recommend that you uncheck the box 'Fit picture to frame' if it is checked, because when you're making things larger it's going to make the quality a little more blurred.

And so just make sure that the 'Fit picture to frame' box is not checked and that means you'll get the best quality of your backing paper.

Now this is a very cool feature...

Ok, you might want to print out a whole backing paper. But what if you only want to print out half a sheet? Or maybe you're making a small card and you just don't want to print out the whole thing...

You can actually reduce this.

So if you press this one it'll actually make it a lot smaller, like this. And then this one here makes it slightly smaller. This one here - see, you've got lots of options here. Even smaller. And now we're getting into weeny ones here. But as you can see, that really does help you.

If you don't want to print out a full page like this, then go for one of these options instead.

So you might say, 'Ok, Claire. That's all well and good but I actually want to keep it this size, I just want half of the sheet. I don't want the whole thing to get smaller.'

Well, I've got another print tip for you. And that is to use what comes with Windows - a software package called Paint.

Using 'Paint'

Go to 'All Programs' and then scroll up to 'Accessories.' Click on that and you'll see 'Paint.'

Another way to open 'Paint,' is to open up your Floral Doodle eKit again (or whichever printable kit that you want to open), and then right-click on the file you want to print out. Scroll down to 'Open With' and you'll see 'Paint' in the list.

So here we are in 'Paint,' as it says at the top of my screen.

Now, this is a bit big so all you need to do is go to 'View,' 'Zoom,' 'Custom,' and get more of a birds eye view. So let's make it 25% smaller. Actually, let's make it even smaller still. Let's make it 12.5%. Here we go, so we can see the whole sheet here.

So let's crop this so that it will only print half of your sheet.

How do you do that?

Well, let me show you!

So we want to crop this backing paper because we don't actually want to print out the whole thing. But we want to keep the size of the flowers and everything in it. You do that by going to this tool here, which is the 'Select' tool (it's a little dashed rectangle).

Click on that with your left mouse button and then over here, place your mouse in the top left-hand corner. Then I want you to click with your left mouse button, keep holding it down and then drag it out to the size you want.

So I'm clicking down now with my left mouse button and I'm dragging it out to, I'd say, just over half.

Let go of your mouse button when you're happy with the size, and then go to 'Image,' and then 'Crop.' Go to 'File,' 'Save As.'

Before you do anything, I would save this file with a new file-name. Otherwise if you save it accidentally, you're going to save over the initial file, which will be the original file (the whole sheet) and you don't really want to do that!

To save the file with a new filename go to 'File,' 'Save As,' and enter your new file name. For example, if you're using one of the Floral Doodle backing papers, you could rename the file as '03-floral-doodle-cropped.' You could save the new file in the same folder as your existing printable background, if you want. Or you could save it to another folder on your computer, it's up to you. But by saving the cropped image with a new file name, you won't accidentally save over your original printable.

So that is your cropped file.

Then all you do, is print it.

To do this go to 'File' and then choose 'Print.' This will take you to a print screen and then you either press 'ok' or you can fiddle about with the settings before printing your page. Speaking of which, let's have a look at the printer settings.

Get To Know Your Printer

[Still in 'Paint':] Go to 'File,' and then choose 'Print.'

I'm going to show you a few of the things that my printer can do. It's a cheap printer - I think it cost me about £60 GBP or £70 GBP, which is about $120 - $140 [at the time of this recording]. So it's not that expensive for a printer.

Hopefully if I show you some of the things that I can do with my printer, you'll be able to kind of get a feeling for what your own printer can do. If it's an Epson printer, it might have a similar way of working. If it's a different brand then I'm sure it'll have similar features. If you're stuck, you can always have a look at your printer's manual.

So in order to fiddle about with these settings, you need to go to 'Preferences'. That's where you can fiddle about with the settings for your printer. So let me show you a few of the things that you can do...

First and foremost, you can choose the quality of your printout. Here it ranges from a draft quality, for economical and high-speed printing, to top-quality photographic printing.

Now as you can imagine, the further you move up this chain, the more ink you use and the better the quality of your printout.

Obviously if you're a complete die-hard crafter, then you'd probably go for the photo setting or the best photo setting. But you don't necessarily have to go the top quality settings.

I usually set it to 'Text and Graphics' (and once I accidentally printed it on 'Draft') and they came out fine. But as I say, that might just be my own printer.

The next thing you should choose is the type of paper because the printer will print differently depending on the type of paper that you use. So as I mentioned before, I just use plain inkjet paper - a good quality inkjet paper. But you can also use all sorts of different types. Glossy paper, for example.

And then, of course, there's the size of your paper. Now, the printables from Making-Handmade-Cards.com are set to print on 'A4 210mm x 297mm' sized paper, but you can actually choose any size paper that you want.

This is where you would change to a U.S sized paper. Just select it from the drop-down menu.

This part asks you which way you'd like to print things out. Now the printables on Making-Handmade-Cards.com are always set to print for a portrait orientation, so just make sure that the box next to this option is checked.

Let's go to the 'Advanced' tab on here...

Now, depending on the ink you use and your printer, you'll find that sometimes some colors don't print out as vividly as the others. If you're having a problem with contrast or if you're finding that one color is darker than another, then just play about with the 'Color Management' settings.

For example, you can make things brighter. Or if you find that on your screen a design has a really good contrast; the background might be a lot lighter and the foreground might be a lot darker, but when it comes to your printout you can't really see the difference, then try playing about with the contrast. And then, for example, if you find you don't have enough yellow in your printout, then just drag the pointer towards the '+' sign. Or you may find that they're all a little too blue/green so you can change this by moving the Cyan and Yellow pointers towards the '-' sign.

Just play around and if you're worried about using too much ink, then just print out a smaller version like I showed you in 'Windows Photo Gallery' and that would be just fine.

Let's go to the 'Page Layout' tab now.

Now this is cool. This is one of my favorite features because basically you can tell it to print half the size here as well.

You remember in Windows Photo Gallery where we could choose if we wanted to print it half the size, or a quarter of the size? Well, actually you can do it here as well, in your printer settings.

If you click 'Multi-Page,' and set 'Pages Per Sheet' to '2,' then that's what would happen. If you set 'Pages Per Sheet' to '4,' then it would print out at quarter of the size. You can keep going up or down, to increase or decrease the size of your printouts. That's a really cool feature.

Of course, you've got to remember that it's going to be reducing the whole thing.

For example on the Floral Doodle eKit, if you want to keep the flowers at the same size, you need to go into 'Paint' (like I showed you earlier), and you need to crop it and then print it out.

But if you're quite happy with just having the whole sheet shrunk, then this option or using Windows Photo Gallery is fine.

Now before we finish this tutorial, I'd also like to take you to the 'Maintenance' tab because it's very important to look after your printer.

For example, which ink cartridges should you use?

Should you stick to the branded ink cartridges that your printer manufacturer recommends, or should you just go for cheap ink?

Well, that's up to you! I have actually tried both versions. I have one printer where I use cheap ink, and another printer where I use only the Epson branded ink.

The printed sheets where I use the Epson branded ink are better quality - especially if you print onto good quality, inkjet paper or photo paper. Having said that, I have printed out sheets using cheaper, non-branded ink on my other printer and if you are willing to fiddle about with the color management (which is here), then yes, you can get some good printouts.

To be honest, it's up to you. I can't remember the ins and outs of it, but I remember reading somewhere that if you use ink that is not by the brand, then you're not covered for warranty or guarantee or something. I don't know if that's for all the main manufacturers, I don't know. But just make sure before you put an unbranded ink cartridge into your printer that you read through your printer documentation, just to make sure you know what you're getting yourself into.

The other thing I want to show you are these settings. These basically look after your printer...

For example, after you've printed quite a few sheets, you might find that you're starting to get lines across your printout, or it's just not looking too good and it looks like the printer heads might be clogging up.

Just go to something like 'Head Cleaning.

I'll click on that so I can show you...

It says, 'Click start to clean the print head nozzles. Only clean the print head when faint areas or gaps appear in your printout.'

Basically that will clean your printer heads for you, and hopefully after that it should be fine. You might find you have to do it a couple of times (I've had to do it a couple of times, sometimes one after the other) but usually it does the job!

And then, of course, there's the 'Printer Head Alignment' as well, and the 'Nozzle Check.'

And if you just want to check how much ink you've got left, then 'Status Monitor' is the one you need to use.

My printer isn't actually on but usually it'd show you how much ink I have left here.

So I really hope that you found this video helpful, in getting to grips with your printer and really getting the best out of your printables.

Printables open up a whole new world: you can start collecting printables and get a huge library on your computer, or on CD ROMs, at your fingertips. And you'll have all of this creative inspiration, all of these creative options, and the great thing about it, is that it's guilt-free!

You know, once you've got the printable kit, that's it. You can use them again and again and again. So you can actually print out your favorite sheets without feeling guilty, and knowing that you can go back and print out 1, 2, 3, 4 more copies if you want, even more, and you can keep going.

So I really hope that this little video really spurs you on to not be afraid of your printables, to go and explore them and see what you can do.

And if you find that the colors on your printouts aren't as bright or as balanced as you would want, then play around with those settings that I showed you. If you don't have an Epson printer, I'm sure yours will have something similar.

Get more card-making tips and ideas at Making-Handmade-Cards.com

Good luck, and happy card making!

Claire
Making-Handmade-Cards.com
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