Hi Folks:

This is just a quick update to our previous calendar post as we’ve gone through the (5000+) images we’ve made this year and picked out 12 for our calendar. As usual, some of the images were made with our cell phones and some were made with the Sony a7rIII camera. Half of the images were made by Marcia and half by Mike, but none of that really matters. All of this year’s images were made in and around Victoria, BC except for October’s, which was made in Tofino, BC.

Combined, our calendar looks like the image below. If you’d like to download a copy for yourself, click the image to link to a .pdf version.

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This is the thirteenth year that we’ve made our photo calendar templates available, both for MS Word users (for those who don’t use graphics programs) and as .png files for those who do. As before we will be making our own calendar available in .pdf format for those who are interested, but (as we did last year) we’re doing the post in two parts. For our calendar we use images made in that month (i.e. the image for May 2023 was made in May 2022). Since we haven’t yet gotten to December our calendar isn’t yet complete, but we wanted to make the templates available so others can work on their own calendars.

I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom, Affinity Photo or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the graphics stuff is below that. I used MS Word 2016 to make the template and saved it as a .docx file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:

The large square at the top is a blank table cell. If you click on it and go to Insert/Picture you can add your own image. The easiest way is to select 12 images that all have the same size/shape (4×5 / 8×10 landscape aspect ratio); otherwise you may have to fiddle with the cell heights to make the calendar line up from month to month. Here is the template file:

2023 Calendar template – Word 2016

As mentioned above, I created a set of calendar files (transparent .png files) and two Lightroom templates for the 2023 calendars. All of the images and instructions can be downloaded from this file: 2023 Calendar Template.zip. There are 13 calendar images: one for each month and one for the entire year. The monthly calendars look the same as the image at the top. The templates are based on an 8″x10″ image size, so they’ll fit easily on letter-sized or A4-sized paper. The annual calendar, for example, looks like this:

Finally, we’ve added 12 more high-resolution calendar images (one for each month), but with each month occupying a full 8×10″ space. They look like this:

You can use these calendar files along with your own images to create a 2-sided, spiral bound calendar like this:

or, if you want to get fancy, you can do something like this:

We leave the rest to your creativity! Once we’ve completed our own 2023 calendars in December we’ll add those files to the updated post.

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. Ed Weaver’s (RED Photographic) 2023 Lightroom calendar templates are not yet available but I’ll keep an eye out for them. You can find the ones for 2022 (in several languages) here. Matt Kloskowski has a set of 2023 templates for Lightroom, Photoshop and ON1 Photo along with a video tutorial on creative calendar ideas here. If I come across any others I’ll add them in.

P.S. II, the sequel. You can find the rest of our tutorial posts here. We’re over a hundred now, I think. Two more in the works at this point – one on the Epson 8550 printer, and one on my Capture One workflow. Calendars first, though.