Fake Card Printing

arcedude1

arcedude1

Sleeping a long day of posting.
Member
I just finished a set of fake cards and i'm thinking about getting them printed out and put in a binder to look like real cards. I know that other people have done this before. I really want to print them but i don't know where i can get them printed or what paper i should use. HELP!
 
Use photo paper, semi-gloss. Open in Word, shrink the image down to 6.3 cm x 8.8 cm. Print it, cut it out (preferably with an Xacto knife), and glue it to the front of a real card. I highly doubt you can get them printed at Kinko's or any similar place, as it'd be printing copywritten material, which I'm sure is illegal.
 
thx for the help but, photo paper? i thought that you would use just a heavy kind of card stock. also i want to refrain from glueing it on to real cards. Also, any idea on how to do holo. i doubt you can but just a thought.
 
You can't buy card stock anywhere near the same quality as the stock real cards use. I've been faking for over 10 years, and there's never been any revelation within the community about a good type of stock on which to print.

For holo, you could always use the acetone trick on an old card. Print over it for the background and then glue the Pokémon/rest of the card overtop. I know you said you didn't want to glue, but that's the only method I can think of.

Essentially, there's no way to do what you're trying to do. If there was, the faking community would hear about it. Sorry, man.
 
I'm currently creating and printing off an 18 card eevee evolution set (4 down 14 to go) and its hard going.

Doing what CMP states above is the quickest and easiest way for sure, however the blurryest I'm afraid (especially anything resembling text)

To that end I and a few others (credit to Neko here for the initial info on Publisher and such):

  • Make sure we have a few programs at the ready, Photoshop (or GIMP) Microsoft Publisher (or something incredibly similar).
  • Using Photoshop or GIMP, you need to make the very basic card blank. This blank can only have on it the ABSOLUTE basic things on there (in order to keep as much detail as possible) For example, no Energy Icons, no text, no "weakness" etc, no copyright text/images. Effectively just the border, background, illustration border, poke info bar (most sets have that just beneath the illus. border, where you put height/weight etc) Just have those + the pokemon image, nothing else.
  • Then open Publisher.
  • Once in here, insert the .PNG of the card you wish to use, right click and change its width to 6.3cm (then unlock the constraints so it auto sizes the height to 8.5/8.8cm approx)
  • You now have a card inside Publisher @ the correct size and are now ready to add on your text, energy icons, set symbols, rarity symbols, etc.
You might come across on some sets that the Stage image bits might go blurry, you may have to add that on later; not always but sometimes.

- - - - -

As for holo's and such well what CMP says is true. Nintendo/Wizards had their own machines which printed off layer upon layer of incredibly thin holosheets, onto the image itself. Not something we can do hehe :)

The best you can do for holo's is get as much "holo" on your image as possible and then have a good search for some top-notch glossy paper. Then hope when its inside a ring binder/wallet that the light reflects it well (what I am hoping for atm)

I'd upload an image of my progress atm but the bloody camera has decided that linking to the laptop is too hard -.-

/smacks windows.
 
Thx for the help. what i think i'll try to do is find the heaviest cards stock i can and try printing on that and if that doesn't work then i'll try your methods. So what your saying is that to print it off to look real and not blurry i have to do all the text in Publisher and not in photoshop?

I was just playing around with my printer seeing how it prints the cards and i got the crazyest idea. Do you think it would be a good idea to print the fake card on top of a real one?
 
Don't try that. it works horribly. the card came out with wet ink on it and it was see through.

now i have a really funky looking potion.
 
arcedude1 said:
So what your saying is that to print it off to look real and not blurry i have to do all the text in Publisher and not in photoshop?
Click to expand...
Correct :)

I'm using my own made blanks for the very first sets (jungle, base, fossil, etc) Have had to add in text/images via Publisher for :

  • Basic, Stage 1/2.
  • "Evolves from" & "place <name> on <stage> card"
  • Card name
  • HP
  • Pokemon type icon (top right)
  • Information (length, width, etc)
  • Promo icon
  • Attack details, including seperator black line + energy icons
  • Mini pokedex info @ the bottom
  • "Weakness / Resistance / Retreat Cost" + energy icons
  • illus. text + copyright text + card number (in set)
To give you an idea on whats involved :) It gets annoying when you have to test print alot to get the scale right, but as soon as you have one down, its a case of copy/paste over a new blank and edit accordingly :)

If it helps, heres a few blank cards I made in Photoshop : (the original is about 360pixels wide, this ones resized in photoshop to 280pixels wide in order to help Pblisher out when resizing again in there)

1_Eevee.png
3_Aireon.png
5_Drageon.png
6_Espeon.png


Bit of a spoiler for you all there hehe :)
 
Try to watch your double posting, arcedude1. In the future, just edit your posts. Thanks!

I've never given that method a try, asche, but I've actually found the method I've described to be perfectly fine -- I've never had a problem with blurry images or anything.
 
If you're making your own blank, to make it easier on yourself and print directly from photoshop you can set the canvas size to 6.3cm by 8.8cm and the resolution to around 150 and start from there.
When you print it out the card will print to scale.
 
I've actually had trouble with that tbh Hyun, via photoshop. If you set it to 6.3/8.8 its still too large, its like Photoshop can't scale it correctly.

Tis why a few of us do the stuff above and get 100% accurate results in Publisher :)
 
I use photoshop and it works just fine. except i have a more outdated version so maybe the problem is in newer versions. I always set the size to 2.5 by 3.4375 inches. i know that its wrong but its really close to the actual size.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top