Expert-Level Tips to make a Custom Photo Puzzle for Christmas

Welcome back to Karen puzzles, so a very popular gift, especially around the holidays, is to make a custom puzzle of your own family photos. So today I’m going to walk you through how to make the best one possible from a jigsaw puzzle expert – and I am so happy to tell you that today’s video is sponsored by ravensberger ravensberger puzzles are super high quality and they’re custom photo puzzles are no exception. So I got three custom puzzles made and I can’t wait to tell you all about them and to solve them. But first I want to share a couple tips on how to choose the best photo possible for your custom puzzles featuring my own childhood photos, because I was such a cute. Kid like you guys, are not ready.

So one of the most common emails that I get from viewers is someone who got a custom puzzle made, but the photo they chose turned out to be really really difficult to do as a jigsaw puzzle. So, to avoid that scenario, here’s what you should keep in mind, okay, so this is an excellent photo for a puzzle number one, because I am just so cute, but mostly what you want to do is look at the separation of the colors and the textures in This photo, you can see that we have big, distinct areas of pink, blue, yellow purple, green skin colors, and you can see that the subject of the photo takes up most of the image. So you you don’t have a huge expanse of a blurry background. I ended up getting this one made as a hundred piece puzzle, but even if I had done it as a thousand piece puzzle, it still would have been a really fun jigsaw puzzle. In addition to just being the cutest photo of me as a child that ever existed, okay, so now this one is, I would say, A medium example.

Yes, I am still very cute sitting there doing my puzzle, but look at how much of this image is just a brick wall. The bottom half of this photo is totally fine because there is a lot of different stuff going on. But if you got this made into a puzzle, you could very easily just solve the bottom half and then just never want to finish that huge expanse of brick up at the top. So you definitely want to avoid photos where the subject only takes up a small portion of the image, and you have a large section that is all one color or one texture. Okay, this one – I didn’t even bother scanning properly because it would be such a bad puzzle.

You might be tempted to use photos from a big trip that you took, but you’ll want to try to avoid photos where a huge part of it is just sky or just a landscape like yes, it’s very cool that we took this trip out to the national Parks out in like Arizona but imagine if your family was not in the photo is this an image that you would still want to solve as a jigsaw puzzle? Personally, I don’t think so, but I do have a little trick for you. So when you’re ordering your puzzles, Ravensburger gives you the option to turn your photos into a collage of images, and this will always make a puzzle way easier and way more doable, and some of these photos would have been fine puzzles just on their own. But imagine if the entire bottom third of a thousand piece puzzle was just these ball pit balls or if a third of the puzzle was just this wall, texture right here. That would be so boring.

So, instead I was able to fit in a bunch of different photos from all of our adventures over the years, so since each photo is fairly small, you avoid having huge expanses of just one one solid color. Well, I guess, except for our black clothes here in the large photo, but it’s still less space than if this photo took up the entire puzzle. But okay, let’s say there is a photo that you really really want to use, but it does have a boring background. Well, I have three ideas, for you number one is to bring the photo into Photoshop or a free tool like canva and then just add some graphics or stickers over the really boring parts of the picture. You really just want to think about how many different elements there are throughout the image and really look at where there are different, colors and different textures that you can identify when you’re putting it together as a puzzle.

My second idea would be to add a caption with some information about who’s in the photo where and when it was taken. This might be a better idea. If you have an older family photo because then even if this puzzle gets passed down to different family members, all the information about who’s in that photo is already right there in the puzzle, and it makes the puzzle easier to do so win-win all around. And then my third idea, if you are already good at Photoshop, would be to add a subtle gradient just to the background of the photo. You guys have heard me talk about how much I love gradient puzzles and just having that very slight color separation will just make it so so much easier to do as a jigsaw puzzle all right.

So once you’ve chosen your photos, the next step is to order the puzzle. So I’m going to walk you through just how easy it is to order a custom puzzle off of Raven rate. Oh my God, off of ravens Burgers Ravens Burgers website. That is such a hard sentence to say I’m so sorry, okay, let’s let’s get started so the first thing that you’ll want to do is choose how big you want your puzzle to be. You can choose anywhere from 24 pieces up to at 2 000 pieces.

The next step is to upload your images and, if you’re, making a collage you’ll want to upload all of your images right here and when you’re uploading. Your images make sure that the images you’re choosing are as large as possible. So a 1 000 piece puzzle is going to end up being 27 by 20 inches and the best practices is to print at 300. Dots per inch, which means the ideal photo, would be 8 100 pixels by 6 000 pixels. Now this is larger than most standard cameras will take, so it’s totally fine to use a smaller photo than that, and this tool is just going to upscale it to the size it needs to be.

But I’m just saying if you have the option of like getting the photo off of Facebook versus getting the original off of the camera’s memory card like go for the highest quality version that you can okay. So the next step is to design our puzzle, and so you can see you can do one image or a collage. So if you do one image you can zoom in or out on your photo to get it framed up properly, but just be careful about zooming too far in because you don’t want it to print out blurry. And if you decide to make a collage you can see there are different options with different amounts of images. You can also do a portrait versus a landscape within this tool.

You can also frame up your image again. You can zoom in or out, and you can replace the photos and arrange them in whatever order you would like. You can also change the color of the frame and the border. So I think white looks the nicest black might be okay, but if you really wanted one of these bright colors, you do have that option and they actually have this whole rainbow picker. So you can literally choose any color on the rainbow that you want so once you’re happy with how your puzzle looks.

The next step is to design the box. So if you click on cardboard, you can choose the background. Color. Based on any of these options, you can also click into these tabs and you can choose different illustrations based on the different holidays, and if you decide to go with the metal packaging, they don’t have the patterns for that one. You can just do the different colors.

So our final step is just to add a title to the puzzle: um, I’m not a great copywriter, so my titles, as you’re gon na see, are pretty basic, but you can write anything that you’d like here. So if you need to go back and edit anything, you can just click back into any of these tabs, but once you’re happy with how it looks you’re just going to click, add to basket and from there you can just continue ordering it as if you are Ordering anything else online. So if you’re ordering one of these puzzles as a Christmas gift, you all want to make sure to put in your order by December 9th, and if you want to get 20 off, I actually have a coupon code for you. You can use karen20 the link to the custom puzzle site and all the info about the promo code will be down in the description but okay. That was a lot of talking.

So now, let’s go ahead and solve all three of these puzzles. Oh, my gosh, it is so funny to see my own face on a raven’s Burger puzzle. Piece puzzle is that you can so easily separate out all of these inside lines and then you have a grid to work off of which makes the puzzle so much easier. And if you were doing this with your family, you could have different people do different photos. So, like one person could do this yellow photo, somebody else could do the big one.

If that was my family, I would volunteer to do the big photo. I just finished my first complete photo. I definitely made this puzzle pretty easy. It’S totally taken me about two hours to get to this point. So if you want your puzzle to be more difficult, uh just do the opposite of everything I said earlier, but I’m loving this puzzle.

I love how the pieces are pretty matte, so you’re not getting a lot of shine or glare. No matter what angle you look at it from, and I love that the piece shapes are pretty unique. So, even if you do have a section like this, with a lot of the same texture, you can use the piece shape to figure out where the pieces are gon na go. It is very strange putting together a puzzle of your own face, though so just be warned so yeah. I am loving this, although of course I do have a whole lot lot of solid black pieces left.

I may not have thought all the way through putting this specific photo right here in the largest spot. That was a great example of what not to do in your custom puzzle on the box. It didn’t look like that big of a section and on the computer screen. It didn’t look like that big of a section, but there are actually so many solid black pieces in here. I think it took just as long to do this section of the puzzle as it did to do the entire rest of the puzzle, so another tip could be to print out your design as just like a low quality test version, but print it out at the Actual size that the puzzle is going to be just so, you can see how big the solid colored sections really are, or you know, wear more interesting clothes and don’t have a black clothing, only dress code for your puzzle, videos, but okay, let’s move on to the 500 piece puzzle that I got made look at how cute we are.

This photo was taken at the photo studio of a JCPenney in if I’m not wearing glasses. Yet I would estimate this was taken in 1997, but I liked it for a puzzle because you have this green texture on the sweater. You have this red plaid. You have this wallpaper in the back. There are some kind of dark areas, but it’s only a 500 piece puzzle, so I think this one will be a totally doable and super festive.

Oh wait before I do that puzzle. I was also gon na. Do the pickup challenge with this one? It feels really solid, so let’s see yay, I did it if that black section just crumbled apart, I would have been inconsolable. Thank you like equally creepy, but also really fun.

I know it looks so strange, but I think it’s so funny. Oh my gosh. This puzzle is so cute and if you and your family are not the most experienced puzzlers, this 500 piece size is definitely a much more approachable and manageable than the Thousand piece puzzle. Once again, let’s see if I can pick it up, I think I can there. It is ah okay.

Well, it didn’t go down quite as easily, but I was able to pick it up, but okay, I have one puzzle left. This is the 100 piece puzzle. As you can see, I got this one in the metal box, so this is what that looks like and when you open it up, look at how giant those puzzle pieces are. I think, since this one is only a hundred piece puzzle, I think I’m gon na try to do it in order like row by row piece by piece. So, let’s see, if I can do it three three, two three and the very last piece there we go so there’s your bonus challenge of the day, grab a hundred piece puzzle and see how fast you can do it in order without getting any pieces wrong.

I got four pieces wrong, but I think that’s a pretty good showing for this random challenge that I just put upon myself. Oh and one more time we’ve got ta. Do it? Okay, wait! No!

That’S not how you do the pickup challenge, this one’s the pickup challenge. All right, this one doesn’t feel quite as stable as the other ones, but I still did it again. We had a little bit of a bumpy Landing, but it’s only 100 pieces. So it’s all good. Well.

This is a video that I’ve genuinely been wanting to make for a while. So I’m so happy that I got to work with ravensberger to do it remember if you’re getting a custom puzzle made this Christmas, don’t only think about what the photo means to you. Also, take a really close look at the composition, the colors, the textures, and really think about whether it would make a fun jigsaw puzzle, because not every image in the world is gon na be fun to do as a puzzle. So if you want to order your own custom puzzle from ravensberger, you can use my code karen20 for 20 off your order and remember that you have to get in your order by December 9th. If you want to receive it by Christmas.

That’S the magic date December! 9Th put it your calendar. Well, I’m definitely going to be bringing all of these puzzles home for Christmas. When I told Katie that I was getting the maid and showed her the designs she was like, I want to solve them and bring them home, so I can solve them. So let me know in the comments, if you have ever gotten a custom puzzle made and if you have any additional tips that you would like to share with the class your code word for watching all the way to the end is cute because I know you’re.

Just dying to tell me what a cute little baby I was so I hope this was helpful and I guess that’s it for today. So I will see you all in the next one.