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Old Eye Christmas Cards
24 December 2025
After years of experimentation, we've settled on a holiday card creation convention that serves the season (and us) well. We've had two goals: to have a little fun and to send things at the last moment.
As for that last moment, we don't like to rush the season. But we also like to include as many people as we can. So the last thing we send is an email card we create from a photo. That's delivered instantly.
Before that, we mail just a few cards to family and close friends. Twenty of them. The Post Office makes it hard to time this accurately but it's such an ingrained ritual to make the cards, sit by the fireplace, write them with our old Mont Blanc with a brandy for inspiration and walk them to the post office in the morning that it wouldn't be Christmas for us if we didn't do it.
A PHOTO TO START
We usually find something to photograph that reflects the season but this year it was hard. Amazon has ensured there are less brick and mortars around and that means less display windows, so less scenes to shoot.
We did find one this year, though it featured Santa freelancing. It was at the Breitling watch store that used to be the Florsheim store on Union Square.
Santa Flying. One image from the Breitling shop window display.
We took a photo of the Santa ornament to flying a gift to someone without a reindeer in sight. And another of Santa holding a surfboard. Through the glass, avoiding reflections.
CONTEXT PLEASE
When we looked at them on the big screen in Photoshop, though, our Santa needed context. A setting, that is, other than a luxury brand store display.
We could have scoured our collection of 80,000 images for, well, something. Like a sky. Or, we thought, we could tap into Photoshop's Generative Fill to see what it could conjure up.
We selected the subject and copied the ornament to a new layer to isolate it. Then we asked Generative Fill to add a background, describing what we had in mind. We tried a night sky with the moon and the city at night from above for two options. The surfer got a beach st sunset.
Santa & the Moon. Sky by Firefly.
We liked the results, especially the night sky with the moon, but there was still a little old fashioned work to do.
The cityscape needed a blur to send it below Santa. That was easy. And we added a motion blur to Santa after we duplicated and offset the duplicate. No problem there either.
The surfer needed more integration though. We had to sink his feet in the wet sand.
We let Generative Fill figure it out for us. We selected the feet and the sand around them and asked it to bury the feet in the sand.
Feet Buried. Two heads are better than one.
It did better than we expected but the feet were too big. So we tapped the Lasso tool to grab the sand around the end of the toes, copy that to a new layer and move it closer to the ankle. We just needed a couple of clicks with the Rubber Stamp tool to finish the job.
Proving, perhaps, that two heads are better than one. Firefly's and our own.
THREE TO GO
Before we knew it, we had three images for our Strathmore Photo Mount cards (105-230).
We just had to print them on the DP-DS626A dye sub printer, affix them to the cards and stack them up for our session with the brandy.
It would be the first time we relied on artificial intelligence through Generative Fill's ability to tap into Adobe Firefly to create an image.
But even more interesting to us what that Firefly was just another tool that had helped us create our final image. It didn't create the image, we did. In fact, it was the mix of a new tools like Select Subject and Generative Fill with old skills like using Layers, Motion Blur and Gaussian Blur, and using the Rubber Stamp tool (of all things) that made the images we wanted.
Partly AI, partly Old Eye.
The only thing left was to refashion our San Francisco fly-over image into an ecard for family and friends that are far away.
Santa Flying. Flying over San Franciso.
But that wasn't hard at all.