How to Produce a Free Calendar in Pixia

The first step in producing your own calendar is to open a blank document by going to File > New. In the dialog that opens you can specify the document size that you want or pick from a preset list, and also set the resolution. When you're happy with the settings, just click the OK button.

Now go to the View menu and click on Filter. Alternatively, you can just press your F6 key to open the Filter dialog. In the Filter dialog, you need to click on Utility in the list in the left hand column and then select Calender [sic] from the right hand column.

The filter can only produce one month at a time and you need to click the Setting... button to choose the month. The options in the Setting... dialog are pretty self explanatory, with the first fields for selecting the year and month. There are also options for selecting the Font and choosing to make it Italic or Bold, though in my experiments fonts seemed to be displayed as Bold regardless of whether or not I clicked the Bold setting.

You can also choose to add Horizontal and/or Vertical rules around the dates and even apply a Shadow to the text. If you don't want a Shadow, just set the Position and Blur fields to 0. When you're happy click OK and then the Execute button.

You should only need this step if you previously set the Style option to Upper. If you did, then you should now have the calendar at the bottom of the page and a black place holder box at the top right. To remove this box, you need to click on the Selection – Box tool in the toolbar across the top of the window – the icon is a square. Now you can click and drag to draw a selection around the black box.

My background color is white, so I now need to set the selected color in the Color palette to white also. This is done by clicking in each of the Red, Green and Blue sliders and dragging them to the right so that each one is set to 100. This sets the selected color to white, but if your background color is other than white, you will need to select the same color as your background. Once the correct color is selected, you can click on the Fill tool (paint tin pouring a puddle of red paint). This fills the selection with the selected color and removes the black box. Click the Deselect button (square with red X).

Note: If you right click on the background of your image, the selected color will be automatically set to the background color.

The calendar doesn't automatically add the year so if you want to display the year you will need to add it using the Text tool. Before continuing, you need to select the color that you want to use for the new text – I chose black.

Now go to the Paint menu and click on Text to open the Text dialog. You can now type the text you want into the first field and adjust the other settings to achieve different results, such as blurring the text, adding shadows or even applying a gradient effect. Before this step, I removed the month name from the top of the page and so have added this along with the year using the Text tool.

You can now move the text by clicking on it and dragging it to the desired position. Once correctly positioned, you just right click on the text and click Paste. At this point the text can no longer be repositioned or edited.

To finish the calendar you can add an image. Just go to File > Open and select the image you intend to use. Once open, go to Edit > Copy and then click on the calendar document and go to Edit > Paste to place the image into the calendar. You can now resize the image and reposition it if desired and then right click on the image and click Paste As New Layer – this gives you the option to reposition the image later if you change your mind.

The free pixel-based image editor Pixia can make producing a customized calendar very easy. When you have produced calendars for all twelve months, you can either print them directly from Pixia or save them to a different file format and use them in other ways.