These Photo-a-Day ( PAD ) style one year calendar templates 8400 pixels (vertical) x 5600 pixels (horizontal) (280 dpi) can be used to make an attractive and very interesting custom calendar featuring more than 365 (372) of your favorite images. It is suitable for printing at photographic quality to a size of 30" x 20" or larger (probably good up to 60" x 40"). Many online printing services offer very large prints at a reasonable price.
How to use this template:- Open your saved copy of this file using some quality image-manipulation software, such as PhotoShop or Corel PhotoPaint, and then re-save the file in a loss-less format such as tif, bmp, cpt (corel photopaint) PSD or PDD. If you are using one of the GIF file templates you'll probably want to overlay the template on a background of your choice before saving the file in a lossless format. It will probably take you sometime to paste in all your images and repeated re-savings in jpg format will result in the degradation of the template and your inserted images (in GIF format the images will be converted to 8 bit color which will degrade the appearance of your inserted images) so please convert it to a loss-less format before loading your images. The degradation WILL become very apparent after a large number of saves and after all that work you'll want a nice crisp product. When you have finally completely filled in the template you can then save it as a jpg file and upload it for printing. If you do upload for printing, remember to remove the check mark from the zoom and trim box, so you do not lose important details in the periphery of the picture like some of the days of the year. The template is designed to be used with images resized to 240 x 320 pixels (280 dpi) (there is sufficient border space to allow somewhat larger images to be used with a slight variation in aspect ratio up to approximately 254 x 364 pixels ). I recommend selecting 365 landscape images and cropping/resampling/resizing to fit these dimensions first and possibly giving the final file a little sharpening (the batch processing feature in many programs can come in very handy here but if you do them one by one on a daily basis manually you'll probably get better results by giving the pictures individual attention). Working in jpg fomat with these mini images is fine as they aren't getting repeatedly worked. Open the template (loss-less format version) and then paste in your favorite images (non-copyrighted ie your own, or an image you have permission to use) in over the appropriate rectangles (center of which is 240 x 320 pixels). By offsetting your pictures a pixel up and to the left you can use two sides of the rectangle for a shadow effect. Alternatively using an image slightly larger say 243 x 324 gives you a little latitude in positioning the images while covering the guide lines. Remember to save on a regular basis so you don't loose you work so far (it's OK you are using a loss-less format) and save the resulting file. When it is finally complete it is safe to save in jpg format for uploading to a printing service. I have also included on this page http://www.pbase.com/455rocket/photoaday_ a couple of examples of small sections of completed templates so you can get an idea of what the final product will look like when printed at full size. If you print these at their designated size (280 dpi) approximately 6.5 x 4 inches (for both examples) the thumbnail images will be the same size they would be if the full calendar was printed at 30" x 20". If you wish to match the fonts used in this template, the months (column titles) are given in 'Arial 18 bold', the numerical portion of the date is Arial 24, and the day and month abbreviation are given in Arial 8. Please check the calendar dating, since I take no responsibility for possible errors or omissions. If you want to support the caffeine addiction that keeps these templates coming click here to donate a coffee.