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Use Aperture Watermark to Make Baseball Cards

by Jim Westveer

I was asked to photograph a T-Ball game for my grandson last week, and I showed up with a couple of lenses and no real idea of what I was in for.

First, I should say that, if you've never attended a T-Ball game, you've missed out on a bunch of good belly-laughs while watching five year olds trying to remember all the "rules" (like run to first base after you hit the ball, not to third base).

When I returned home, I was pleased that I actually did capture a bunch of good shots of everyone at bat, and a few of them in the field. I then thought that it might be a good idea to turn the photos into baseball cards for each of the players. A quick search with Google turned up a Creative Commons Public Domain License Baseball card template by Creative Creature.

The template is available in .psd format, and after a few minutes of adjusting/changing/ customizing, I had a template that I could use for the photos I took that afternoon. The .psd template has a background layer that you can simply use in Photoshop or gimp, replace the background with your photo, and presto/chango one has a rookie baseball card. Well that wasn't too hard, but now I was looking at exporting 25 photos, importing them into my graphics program in the correct layer, saving them to disk, and re-importing them into Aperture.

Blah! I hate mindless repetitive work. There must be some easier way.

After a bit of thinking, I came up with the idea of just saving the template as a PNG to preserve transparency, and using that image as my cookie cutter watermark to simply lay over the top of all of the images.

The only "trick" to this approach, is to save the .png template with the background set to transparency, and save it the same physical size as my original photograph. This way the Watermark fits nicely over the entire image, and the photograph is only minimally cropped by the border.

I set my export settings to use a watermark. I didn't scale the watermark, as I have already saved it the same size as your camera originals. Then, I exported the photos using my saved watermark. The rest is easy: print and I'm done.

Here's what it looks like when exported with the watermark over the photograph. And the bottom line: making 25 photo baseball cards with Aperture is a snap.

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