Greeting Card Shop 4 is a cleanly designed program with small clip art and template libraries. Unlike in The Print Shop and Hallmark Card Studio, you can only make invitations, greeting cards and envelope designs in Greeting Card Shop 4. It’s compatible with Avery's greeting card printable sheets and lets you share your projects on social media. It's very out of date, however, and not part of our list of the best greeting card software today.
This greeting card design program runs on an updated macOS, which we had to download before using the software. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial to get an idea of how the program works, though it only has a few of the full version’s templates. When we tested the trial version, the program crashed a few times, but we didn't lose any of our projects.
Even in the full version, there aren’t many templates and clip art images – Hallmark Card Studio for Mac includes 10 times as many templates and three times as many graphics as Greeting Card Shop 4. Some of the other programs we tested have hundreds of thousands of images.
Greeting Card Shop 4 comes with good-quality graphics. We didn't see any pixelation or distortion when we moved and resized them to fit our test designs. You can also upload your own images to the software.
It’s easy to navigate the program’s drop-down menus, and you can preview designs before opening them. There are also plenty of features and tools, including photo effects and overlays, to alter your uploaded images. Greeting Card Shop 4 has the fewest fonts to choose from to create word art, but there are lots of ways to add effects and dimension to your text.
Because Apple products come with photo editing software, greeting card programs designed for Macs, including this one, don’t include many. Instead, you might use iPhoto, Apple’s default editor, to remove red-eye and fix details before uploading photos to Greeting Card Shop 4.
The newest version of this software includes tools that make designing cards easier. For example, the eyedropper tool copies the color of a single pixel in a photo in your design. You can then use that color to auto-populate a color wheel and create a custom palette. Also, the photo analyzer tool tells you which colors are dominant in your photo to help you make design choices.
We tried all these tools with varied success. The color palettes we created from the eyedropper and photo analyzer tools weren't instantly perfect choices for our overall card design. There's a learning curve involved in making these tools perform in a meaningful way.
We weren't too impressed with the help and support Greeting Card Software 4 offers. It has a downloadable, searchable PDF instead of an easy-to-navigate FAQs page. Aside from that, you can browse online forums, or as a last resort, you can send the company an email. The company doesn’t offer phone support. We'd like to see more ways to connect with the developer and more tutorials for first-time users.
Although we liked Greeting Card Shop 4’s interface design, it doesn’t have many templates and graphics. Also, users would benefit from more thorough support, including tutorials and real-time access to company representatives. Still, the software’s toolset makes it an inexpensive way for people with design skills to create new cards from scratch.
