Art and Photography Articles

One of my favorite ways of using digital photos for something unique is making a collage. I might put dozens of photos together and print the result on an 8×10 or an 11×14. Where I live in southern Ontario, Canada, an 8×10 can cost as little as $3 at a one-hour print shop, and looks great hanging on my living room wall in a frame.
My interest in photography began to get serious when I was in 3rd year university and bought an SLR. The digital photography revolution has kicked this enjoyment into overdrive. I have gladly spent more money upfront (digital cameras cost more than similar film cameras) since I knew that in the long run I would save on developing and printing costs. I now take thousands of photos every year, and print less than a couple hundred. Many end up in emails or posted on websites, and many more just get deleted.

The good photos that I take often get digitally modified in my computer. The most common modification that I make is to crop the photo. If you are unfamiliar with the term crop, it is simply cutting out a portion of the outer edge of a photo, thus getting rid of extra unneeded backgrounds. Another common task is to clean up blemishes, either on the person or in the backgrounds.

One of my favorite types of modification is making a collage. I might put dozens of photos together and print the result on an 8×10 or an 11×14. Where I live in southern Ontario, Canada, an 8×10 can cost as little as $3 at a one-hour print shop, and looks great hanging on my living room wall in a frame.

Here is a quick overview of the steps I take to create a collage. By experimenting, you will get good at this and will probably discover other ways of doing this more efficiently.

(1) Gather together all the photos you want to include in the collage. I make copies and place them in a folder created for the project.

(2) Re-size the photos. We do not need the individual photos to be 3,000 by 2,000 pixels, and this just puts more strain on computer memory use. If I am making an 8×10 collage and using 20 photos, then I might make each one about 400 to 500 pixels wide. The height will be adjusted to keep the same ratio. (For the purposes of this tutorial I am assuming that all the photos are in landscape mode. You will learn by doing how to handle portrait mode ones)

(3) Create the background. Using the File/New menu, create a blank photo background. For an 8×10 I make it 2,500 pixels wide by 2,000 pixels high. This is 250 pixels per inch, which at my one-hour place looks great. I usually just select white for the background, but you may want another background colour.

(4) Copy the individual photos to the background. I open one of the 500×375 photos, and choose Copy from the menu. I then make the background the active window and choose the Paste/As New Layer option under the Edit menu. This puts a copy of my photo in the middle of the background. Use the mouse to drag this away from the middle, in order to make room for the next one.

(5) Complete this process until all the photos are on the background.

(6) Now the fun. Rearrange the photos to suit your desire. Just use the mouse to drag them where they look good. Add text as needed. Get creative.

(7) Save the result in the native psp file format as that will preserve all the layers in case you want to rearrange the photos. Then save it in jpg high quality mode so you can take it to the print shop.

You are done! Get the print made, pick up a frame, and presto … a photo that friends and relatives will spend more time looking at due to the various photos that make up the collage.

What’s next? Try some trickier things. For example, get more crowded and have photos partially on top of others. Before do the cut and paste, have a photo rotated at 45 degrees or similar. Who says photos have to be horizontal?

Now get out there and click away!

For more ideas, make sure you visit PhotosByRichard.ca. There are also over 200 articles for photography fans over at NewPhotoArticles.com.

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Tags: Paint Shop Pro, Photo Collage, Photography, Processing Photos

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.