I was toying with the idea of making giant cards for a cool three card monte effect. I have two sets of the jumbo bikes (blue and red) and they're cool and everything but I thought that an even bigger set would look so much more impressive. So I took my jumbo bikes and scanned the back and then the fronts of the ten of spades and the queen of hearts at 300dpi and came out with some super high quality scans. I took the scans and split them into two seperate halves and printed each half on two pieces of 8.5x11 photo glossy paper. I then carefully trimmed and matched up each half and rubber cemented each half onto a thick piece of bristol board. What I came out with was a card that measured approximately 10 x 16. The bristol board added the right thickness and the images for each side (4 per card) were all printed on photo glossy paper to add that "plastic coated" effect. Needless to say the cards came out much better than I had expected. They look and feel like real cards and are big enough to impress anyone.

If anyone wants me to send them the scans so they can make their own, PM me with your email and I'll send them, or if anyone has a better idea please share it.

Great Idea, whizzomagic
Did you do anything to the cards to protect them from heavy use. Or, do you think you even need to?
I have made cards in the past, but mine seem to get beat up on the edges.

Also, what brand of Photo paper do you use. I use epson luster professional media.

PW

I just used Hewlett Packard glossy photo paper. I didn't really do anything to protect the cards, but the bristol board center really adds a rigidity to the cards and they seem pretty sturdy. I also sealed the edges around the card with a thin layer of white glue that I painted on with a cheap brush. This will keep the layers from peeling apart as they get older.

You may, at some point, want to take that scan and convert it to a vector image - that way you can make it as big as you want without seeing the effects of stretching a raster image.

How do you convert it to a vector image? Please excuse my PC ignorance here.

Alymn Amlani is correct. A vector image can be enlarged to infinity, where as a raster image will start to fall apart if enlarged too much.

According to your earlier post whizzo, you indicated that you scanned your jumbo cards at a high resolution. That should be fine for what you are doing. A good rule of thumb for the printing industry is 300dpi at the dimensions to be printed.

Now, to convert a raster image (made up of pixels) to a vector image (made up of vector points) can be time consuming. You are going to need to convert each color into a vector shape, and separate each color as a different shape.

I use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. I create my vectors in Illustrator. You can place your image (scan) into Illustrator (for sure) or Corel (I think) and trace over them with the pen tool, which would create vector shapes and then fill the shapes in with colors.

Abobe use to have a program called “Streamline” which could take a raster image and convert it to vector. I do not know if Adobe still makes this program. It has been years since I used it.

Another possible way would be to select each color in Photoshop with the lasso tool, which would make a selection. Then convert that selection into a PATH. These paths can then be exported or opened up in a vector based program such as Illustrator and then manipulated as suggested above.

OR.... you could just find some vector CLIP ART (eps files) of some playing cards and go from there.

Good Luck
PW

Whizzomagic,
another "copying" job.

cm

Vectorizing cards?

Oh what a pitty!
I just started to convert my perfect jpg's (1.200 dpi) to vector.
Really time consuming work to do it perfect!

But up to now my jpg's printed on real Bicycle blanks works just fine.

I allready vectorized a complete deck of Bicycles. And it is not enough to scan them with 300 dpi if you want to vectorize. The lower cards are easier, but the Jakes, Queens and Kings get really difficult if you do not know the tricks of professionals.

As this threat deals with Jumbo Cards (and you scanned a jumbo card with 300 dpi) it is absolutely OK to stretch this image to 200 %. The printing industry needs 300 dpi, but if you calculate it would be enough scanning with 150 dpi. The rest is needed for a quality reserve if you scale an image during the layout phase.

So as a good rule of thumb scan the image with 200 dpi of the final size. If you want to stretch with 300 %, scan it with 600 dpi. And you don´t have to deal with any vectorisation at all.

I frequently use a Paul Daniels routine with three blank giant cards and one ace. Two blank cards are "special". I made all cards by enlarging jumbo piatnik cards at a copy shop. Now the cards are a little bit smaller than standard A4 (297mm x 210mm) and are protected by laminating them. This is no problem with this kind of trick. And believe me, these cards can be seen at distance.

Simply work for the vertically challenged, sorry I am trying to get 50 posts.