Here is a tutorial to create a greeting card by yourself with Photoshop, a beautiful photo and some useful brushes.
Select a nice Christmas or seasonal photo and duplicate the background level. I've chosen a beautiful Poinsettia. I'm so sorry because I can't give the right credits to who has shooted this photo but I've saved it times ago and I can't find who it belongs to.
Create a new layer and fill in with black
Set Opacity 50% and Blending Options on Overlay status.
Duplicate the background level again and apply a Filter>Blur>Lens blur as shown in the picture below.
Because of we want to sharp a little the flower in the foreground position we'll add a layer mask to the blurred level.
Now use the brush with the black colour to delete some mask's area around the flower.
Let's creating the writing area now.
Create a new empty level. Set a Gradient from black to transparent in linear mode, opacity 61%, and create a gradient on the left of the image.
Choose a serif handwritten and classic taste font, set the colour white and write your greetings, in more than one level if it needs.
Click Ctrl-T and rotate a little the text levels to give a more natural effect.
Add an Outer glow effect to the layer style using the settings as in the picture.
Le's adding a little of sparkling stars now, blinking and scattering all around.
For this step I’ve downloaded a set of brushes named stars and blinks. (thank you to Adobe Tutorials Blog to to have shared this tip).
Create a new layer, select the Brush Tool (B), select the star called "Pinced Muestreado 25" brush from the downloaded set.
I added two little stars to the text.
Then create another level. Select "Celestial Star" brush and Scattering Mode in the brush options.
Add some other sparkling stars variating the size of the brush to reach a pleasant and not too heavy effect.
Done!
Playing with other backgrounds, brushes and imagination you can create various solutions such as this old fashioned taste postcard that is my present for you. ^__^
