A special thanks goes out to Courtney Contey of Adirondack Dream Homes who recently purchased the Premium Boarding Pass and tipped me off to an inherent design flaw.

The boarding pass was designed using Fireworks 8 from the Macromedia Studio 8 Suite which is severely outdated, yet usually compatible with some of the free graphic editors out there.  When Courtney called me to ask me how to edit the layers so she could put the right name on the invitation, I mentioned that she needed to know how to edit graphics with layers, and that she needed software that could do so.  She downloaded the widely popular GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) which is a free image editing package to find that the graphic wouldn’t open in multiple-layers.  I tried as well, and it just wouldn’t work for me, but I’m an inexperienced GIMP user, so perhaps I’m missing something.

I’m sure this must have been quite frustrating for her.  Through a connection at work, she was able to open the file in Photoshop, but not everyone has Photoshop, and my goal is to make this as easy as I can within my own skill set (i’m not a programmer, I’m a visual guy) and to not have it cost you a fortune.

Solution

I poked around for a few minutes and figured out that I could in fact save the PNG file straight out of Fireworks in Photoshop format (*.PSD.)  So that’s what I’ve done.

If in the past you downloaded the free version and were unable to manipulate it due to file compatibility constraints, I have re-placed the original with a new Photoshop version.