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There are numerous different ways to communicate nowadays, but nothing says personal quite as much as a hand written letter. There is however a way that you can make a simple handwritten letter appear even more personal.
Im sure youve heard of photo stamps before, but just incase you havent they are postal stamps that you can customize with your own photographs. Thanks to digital cameras this is much easier than it used to be, your images can be easily sent to a company to make into postal stamps.
These postage stamps arent novelty items, they're actually genuine photo postage stamps. Photo stamps can be used to celebrate almost any special occasions, from weddings, to births, and even invitations.
You can order photo stamps in several different rates, or classes of post. You can also order your photo stamps for first class posting for thirty nine cents. You normally have to order a complete sheet of at least twenty stamps when purchasing photo stamps, a sheet of photo stamps should cost around $18.
Free online postage stamps? Think again.
If youre thinking that you could make counterfeit postage stamps with your computer think again. You dont think the USPS ( United States postal service) will be able to differentiate between a legitimate postage stamp and a fake one? Photo stamps use a revolutionary 4D barcode. The barcode allows the USPS to find out when the stamp was created, and also the identity of your computer.
You can print your own photo postage stamps using your local computer. The serial number of this program is incorporated into the barcode, allowing the postal service to track you down. This service is very secure and there has been a lot of research into the security of such systems.
How to choose a subject for your photo stamp?
The postage stamps are the regular size, they measure 1.9 by 1.4 inches, however not all of this can be used for your photo. The actual printable area is 1.1 by 1.1, so basically your photo will be a square. You should bear in mind that most of our photos wont be in this format, you should crop your image so that you can select a square image.
When choosing a photo that you want to turn into a stamp its important to consider several things. Firstly as weve already mentioned you need to consider the proportions and crop the image accordingly.
Also the image will be quite small, if you choose an image with a lot of things in the background then these won't really be noticeable. Ideally you should choose a photo without many background objects. You should choose a photo that contains only large objects or one or two people at most.
Nine times out of ten you'll no doubt want to use a photo of somebody on your photo stamp, so that this is clear on the photo stamp you should take a close up of the face. This will work with whatever the subject of the photo is taken, take a close up picture and print.
One of the best uses for the photo stamps is to celebrate the birth of a baby, to do this you should take a photo of your beautiful baby close up, without many distractions in the background.
If you want to take a group photo and use it on a photo stamp then make sure that everybody is standing as close to one another as possible, and then take a close up focusing on the center head within the viewfinder.
You can experiment with your printer at home as to whether or not you can still make out what the image is when it will be reduced to the size of a stamp. Make sure the preview is accurate before printing or else youll just be flushing money down the drain.
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