Digital Focus: Put Your Loved One on a Magazine Cover

Use a photo and image editing software to create a neat gift.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Goofy Gifts--Make a Magazine Cover

I'm always looking for clever ways to use my digital photos. When it's time to give gifts, I believe that photos are some of the most personal and most appreciated gifts you can give. But just handing someone an 8 by 10 lacks that certain je ne sais quois, as the French like to say. So I like to give cookies with edible pictures, jigsaw puzzle photos, and photo slide show screen savers. The next time a birthday rolls around, here's a clever gift you can make all by yourself, without any help from a bakery: a framed mock magazine cover featuring your guest of honor.

It's really easy to do. All you need is an appropriate, high-resolution photo and an image editing program. Then send it to the printer and it's ready for framing. Ready to get started?

I'm going to make the debut issue of "Kristen Magazine" in honor of my lovely wife. In fact, I'll probably end up giving this to her for Valentine's Day (which is still a few weeks away while I write this issue), so I've got a lot riding on this particular project. If you want to play along at home, you can work with one of my photos, at a drastically lower resolution than I recommend for a project like this; I reduced it for ease of download. Try to use a 2- or 3-megapixel image for your magazine cover.

Add a Border

Our first order of business is to give our picture a magazine-like outline. Load it into your favorite image editor (I'll use Paint Shop Pro) and add a blank border area around your image. You can make it any color you like, but I think a nice fire-red border will be very magazine-ish.

Paint Shop Pro provides an easy way to do this. First, right-click in the color palette (on the right side of the screen) to select red; you should see the current background color change to red. Then choose Image, Add Borders from the menu and enter a border dimension in the resulting dialog box. For the sample image I've provided, you'll want to use about 40 pixels, but a 3-megapixel image might need about 100 pixels to get a similar effect. Be sure to set the border to symmetric so all four sides are the same. Click OK, and you should see a red border around the image.

Add a Title

What's a magazine without a catchy title? Mine will be called "Kristen Magazine"--after all, it's the place people go when they want to read all about Kris. Click the Text button in the toolbar (it's on the left side of the screen and shaped like the letter A) and click in the upper half the picture, more or less where you want the title to end up. You'll then get the Text Entry dialog box. Choose Create as Vector, and check the Antialias option. Type a title, then select it with your cursor and adjust the font style, size, and color. If you move the dialog box out of the way, you should be able to see the text change in the image. Don't worry about the exact placement, because you can fix that in a minute. When it looks good, click OK.

When the dialog box is gone, you can drag the text around the screen and even change its size. Move the cursor over the center of the text, then click and drag to move it. You resize the text by grabbing a corner. If you want to get fancy, you can even rotate it by clicking on and dragging the small box to the right of the center of the text.

Make It Interesting

From here, it's all up to you. Add some "cover lines" to make it look more like a real publication. Add an issue date, some revealing new feature, and more. If you're ambitious, you can photograph a bar code from a real magazine with your digital camera and paste it into the cover. You can check out my first draft online.

Dave's Favorites: Sony's New Digital Camera PDA

From time to time I recommend digital camera attachments for PDAs because I think they're pretty cool. What can I say? I'm a sucker for secret agent-style gadgets, and taking digital images with a pocket organizer is pretty neat. For some folks, it may even be practical.

The problem is that till now none of those digital camera attachments could take what I would call "good pictures." Typically equipped with a VGA resolution (that's 640 by 480 pixels) and a noisy image sensor, they're curiosities and toys, not serious cameras.

But finally, Sony is throwing its not-inconsiderable weight around. The new Clie NZ90 is Sony's latest Palm OS-based handheld PC. It still fits in your pocket--barely--and it still does all the things you'd expect from a PDA. It does appointments, contacts, to dos, and memos. It plays games. But the NZ90 has a 2-megapixel camera built in. That's right--2 megapixels! I've played with the NZ90 and found that its pictures are essentially indistinguishable from those produced by an inexpensive 2-megapixel camera. The images are sharp and have little digital noise, and colors are bright and accurate. It's a real camera!

That's not all. If you set the resolution to 800 by 600 or less, you can use a 2X digital zoom. The Clie has a built-in flash. And it offers a small assortment of exposure modes, like automatic, portrait, and night photography.

The Clie itself is more of a mixed bag. Compared to other PDAs, it's bulky and heavy. It doesn't have much memory (less than 11MB) and it lists for a staggering $800. (You can check PCWorld.com's Product Finder for the best prices.) But this is the first PDA that's ever been able to take enlargement-quality images, and that's pretty amazing.

Q&A: Animating Digital Pictures

I would like to set up my camera to take pictures of wild birds at a feeder just outside my kitchen window, and combine them into an animation showing the birds coming and going at the feeder. What do I need to make an animated GIF?

--Robert Wolfe, Catonsville, Maryland

That sounds like a fun project, Robert. To make an animated GIF of your bird friends, you'll need a few things. For starters, your camera should be able to automatically take pictures at a regular interval. This is usually called interval, sequence, or stop-motion in the camera's on-screen menu. Got it? Great. You can specify how long the camera should wait between each photo--it can be just seconds, minutes, or even hours. Of course, you'll also want to set the camera on a tripod. Your camera's batteries will probably be fine, but you might want to plug the camera into its AC adapter so it doesn't run out of juice in the middle of your session.

After you take the pictures, you'll need software that can "stitch" these images together into an animated GIF or a movie format. I have some experience with Jasc's Animation Shop 3, which comes with Paint Shop Pro 7. I found it for around $82 at our Product Finder.

You might also want to try Ulead's GIF Animator 5.0; I found it for about $42 at our Product Finder. The $20 GIF Construction Set from Alchemy Mindworks could also be a possibility.

Hot Pics

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This week's Hot Pic: "Benches," by Frank Ligori, Peoria, Arizona Frank says that he took this photo in Siracusa, Sicily shortly after a heavy rain. "I was falling behind my tour group, searching for the perfect angle. Fortunately, my Sony Mavica FD-91 floppy disk camera has a 14X zoom. Although I was rushed, I'm happy with the result."

Hot Pic of the Month

Each month we choose one of our weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For January, we chose Don Pullem's "Tawas Point Lighthouse," which has a superb mix of lighting effects.

We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.

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