Love on your Lumia: Creating Valentine’s cards
Valentine’s Day offers a chance to demonstrate our affection towards others, but the day has slightly different connotations around the world.
We look at some of the different customs, along with ways of creating the perfect photographs for a special Valentine’s Day card with your Nokia Lumia and Nokia Creative Studio.
Valentine’s Day takes place each year on the 14th February, and is also known as the Feast of Saint Valentine. In the UK, we celebrate by giving gifts, flowers and cards to our loved ones, but it’s celebrated in different ways depending on country.
In some Latin American countries, for instance, Valentine’s Day is celebrated as a day of love and friendship, where people go out of their way to show appreciation for those they care about.
The concept of platonic friendship is celebrated in quite a few different countries, too, such as Estonia, where people give gifts or get together with friends.
There are still plenty of countries that reserve Valentine’s Day as a day to celebrate relationships though. In China, a man traditionally gives chocolate or flowers to the woman he loves, although the day is celebrated later on in the year.
However big the differences are around the world though, one thing tends to remain the same, and that’s sending a card to tell people that we love and care about them.
Creating Valentine’s Day cards with Nokia Creative Studio
Here are some tips for creating a Valentine’s Day card using your Nokia Lumia and Nokia Creative Studio.
Once you’ve picked out those special photographs, you can use the Focus+Blur function in Creative Studio to fantastic effect, bringing the subject of your photograph to the foreground and blurring images in the background.
If you’re thinking of using a photo with you and your loved one at the centre, it’s the ideal way of getting rid of faces and people in the background, or just for focusing in on the people that matter.
Click the edit button, and under the ‘Blur’ tab press ‘Focus object’ to get started. Following the instructions onscreen, draw around the object that you want to be in focus, and then draw around the object you want to be blurred. The end results speak for themselves, and it couldn’t be easier to do.
Colour Pop is also perfect for a Valentine’s card, letting you add coloured accents to black and white photographs. Want to bring a bright red heart to life? This is the app to do it with.
To use Colour Pop, open the image you want to edit, swipe to the ‘Play’ page and tap ‘Colour Pop’. All you need to do is press the area you want in colour, and tap areas you want to be black and white.
The Collage feature could also have been custom-designed when it comes to creating your own romantic cards, with the ability to add all of your favourite photographs into one loving collage. What better photograph for a romantic card?
From the Play tab, click ‘Collage’, and then pick the images you want to add. You can move photographs around in the collage so the details you want are right in the area you want them.
Once you’re happy with your finished photographs, it’s easy to share them with a computer via SkyDrive, Bluetooth, email or even USB, where you can print them and add them to your Valentine’s Day card.