Tips for setting up your file

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Software to help

Adobe Acrobat Professional will create a print ready PDF from most programs, including Microsoft Word. If you do not have Acrobat Professional, we suggest the fantastic and FREE Primo PDF.

If you have used an image editing program before or want to experiment, try this free online tool. The Playing Card Factory offers this free online photo editing software.

It works inside your browser so there is nothing to download or install. We offer limited support right now on this new tool but if you encounter problems or have basic questions, feel free to contact fun @ The Playing Card Factory. This program uses Flash and you need to have the Flash plug-in to get it to work. Most computers have flash so you are likely ok.

For all orders, please note the following guidelines:

Size of each playing card – 2½” x 3½”
Most digital camera pictures work fine.

To print properly, your GIF, JPEG or JPG, PNG, TIFF, PDF or BMP image must contain a minimum of 300 dots per inch (dpi). Typical images you find on the internet are 96dpi.
They will not print clearly unless they are 3 to 4 times larger than the finished size of the playing card. Larger images can easily be scaled down.

When submitting a JPG image from a digital camera, be sure to set the camera to maximum quality and downsize the image accordingly.

An ideal image to upload will be 4″ x 6″ (1200 pixels x 1800 pixels) at 300 dpi.

Our online site allows you to resize any images you upload to fit proportionally into the playing card size. The closer the original file is to 2½” x 3½ the faster it will upload to our site.

Here’s how to check an image’s dpi in Windows:

To check the size and resolution of an image, right click once on the image file you would like to use and choose “Properties” from the menu. In Windows XP, click on the “Summary” tab, and then click on the “Advanced” tab. In Windows 7, click on the “Details” tab.

This will tell you the size of your image in pixels and the resolution.

Images that are less than 300 dpi, can not be increased to 300 dpi, once an image is lower resolution, it will always be that way.

Photo-editing software

Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for photo manipulation, retouching, and editing. However, Photo software cannot be used to increase the resolution on a low resolution image. The only way to achieve this is to scan your original image at a higher resolution.

If you do not have Photoshop, other FREE photo editing software is available.

If you have used an image editing program before or want to experiment, try this free online tool. The Playing Card Factory offers this free online photo editing software.

It works inside your browser so there is nothing to download or install.
We offer limited support right now on this new tool but if you encounter problems or have basic questions, feel free to contact fun @ The Playing Card Factory.

This program uses Flash and you need to have the Flash plug-in to get it to work. Most computers have flash so you are likely ok.

PhotoScape – Photoscape is a fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos. It allows you to resize and crop images, brighten and colour-adjust images, remove red-eye and add items like text, frames, balloons, etc.

GIMP – is a photo editing software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

Vectored Based Artwork

If you are uploading vector-based artwork for your cards, there is no issue of resolution. Vector-based files are normally .eps files, but not all .eps are vector-based; even when saved from Illustrator. Check your file first to make sure it is truly vector-based, not simply an image placed into Illustrator and saved as an .eps.