Wish You Were Here Postcard

Making Your Own Wish You Were Here Postcard

Most people buy these as novelty gifts or use them as album merchandise. The image itself is straightforward — two figures, one burning, shaking hands — and a lot of DIY versions fall apart at the printing stage. Paper weight, color separation, and the fact that the original artwork has very specific tonal ranges are things that trip people up. I ran into this myself when a batch of prints came out too warm and muddy around the handshake area. Turns out most consumer printers compress those midtones during the CMYK conversion step. The original artwork was designed by Hipgnosis and released with the Pink Floyd 1975 album. The image is widely available online because it predates modern copyright enforcement culture and has been in public circulation for decades. For a Wish You Were Here Postcard project, you can grab high-resolution scans from archive.org or use the official album artwork from the band's estate store. Third-party marketplaces like Etsy also sell printable templates, but check the resolution before buying. Anything under 300 DPI at the final printed size will look soft and pixelated, especially when you're printing on cardstock. Standard postcard dimensions are 4 x 6 inches. That gives you a standard envelope size and keeps shipping costs down. If you're printing at home, go with at least 250 gsm cardstock. Thinner paper warps under the ink and the burnt-hand effect loses definition. Load a single sheet at a time to avoid jams. Most inkjet printers struggle with heavy stock on auto-feed, so manual feed is necessary.

I ended up switching to a business card printer for smaller batches because it handles laminated cardstock without curling. The cost per unit goes up slightly, but the finish is consistent. For larger runs, a local print shop with offset printing will give you cleaner color separation. The trick is sending them a PDF with CMYK values, not RGB. If you send RGB, the printer's software will convert it for you and you lose control over how the black and orange tones render.

Color Correction

The original image has a limited palette: deep blacks, warm oranges, and off-white background areas. When scanning or downloading, the colors often shift. I use a simple level adjustment in Photoshop to bring the black point back down before converting to CMYK. Without that step, the dark areas turn gray instead of staying rich. The orange flames specifically tend to oversaturate on consumer printers, so I dial the saturation down about 10% before sending to print. It makes a noticeable difference. Handwriting the stamp address area adds a real difference. Printed addresses look generic. Use a fine-point black pen for the front and reserve the back for a short note. A standard US postage stamp works fine, though first-class mail on a heavy postcard can run slightly over the base rate depending on weight. My postcards usually come in around 7 to 9 grams, which keeps them in the standard letter rate bracket. Don't stretch or distort the image to fit. The original composition has a specific aspect ratio, and cropping it to fill a 4x6 canvas will cut off the edges of the hands or the background. Also, don't print directly on glossy photo paper unless you want the colors to look neon and artificial. Matte or uncoated cardstock keeps the tones closer to the original artwork's muted aesthetic.

Another issue I see constantly: people use free online converters to swap RGB to CMYK and get washed-out results. Those converters do a lazy guess at the color profile. It's faster and more reliable to do it manually in any editing software where you can select the proper ICC profile for your printer.