Need Help creating Montage

[nycks1]

Can someone tell me how to create the center picture. Thanks In Advance.

[Scottes]

This type of montage is done fairly easily using layers. First, create a new image that's big enough to hold all your images, but don't worry about getting the exact size you can increase the size. Fill that with black.

Open one of the images, select all, and copy and paste into the montage image. (If it's too big click on Image... Reval All - the window will expand to show all of what you just pasted.) This will create a new layer containing that image alone.

To get the size correct click on Edit... Transform... Scale. Hold down the shift key to keep the aspect ratio and grab one of the corner handles and resize the image. Hit the Enter key when you've got the size right. If you mess up, hit Escape to undo the changes.

Use the Move tool to move it around to where you'd like it.

If you wish to blend the image into the background (you probably do) then grab the Magic Wand and select anything that isn't the image itself. You should end up with everything selected EXCEPT the image. Now feather the edge by choosing Select... Feather and choose something like 10 or 20 pixels. Hit Delete. The image will blend into the black background. You'll probably want to play with this a bit, and don't always use the same setting. For a large image 20 might be good whereas a smaller image may look better with 10.

Next play with erasing the edges. The Eraser is good to create the edges like that. Try using different brushes to get different effects, and just run the eraser along the edges. Play a bit with this to get an idea of what you want for effect. Play with brushes as well as diameter and softness. The softer a brush is the more it will blend into the background. Be random with your erase strokes.

Proceed to do the same thing with each image that will be part of the montage.

If you need more room click on Image... Canvas Size and increase it.

If you don't have much RAM you may want to Flatten the image after erasing the edges. But be warned - there's no going back after you flatten. If you can, don't flatten ever - keeping it in layers will make it possible to change and tweak things.

I'd highly recommend saving as a new file every once in a while. Montage1, Montage2, and so on. It's easy to mess up, so you'll be able to go back if you really mess up.

Have fun, and don't give up too easily. This is not an easy task! If you have any more questions feel free to ask.


PS: Make sure you post the results...

[nycks1]

DO you have any screen shots?

[tim]

Just about any photoshop book will teach you how to do that stuff.

[chris.bailey]

This type of montage is done fairly easily using layers. First, create a new image that's big enough to hold all your images, but don't worry about getting the exact size you can increase the size. Fill that with black.

Open one of the images, select all, and copy and paste into the montage image. (If it's too big click on Image... Reval All - the window will expand to show all of what you just pasted.) This will create a new layer containing that image alone.

To get the size correct click on Edit... Transform... Scale. Hold down the shift key to keep the aspect ratio and grab one of the corner handles and resize the image. Hit the Enter key when you've got the size right. If you mess up, hit Escape to undo the changes.

Use the Move tool to move it around to where you'd like it.

If you wish to blend the image into the background (you probably do) then grab the Magic Wand and select anything that isn't the image itself. You should end up with everything selected EXCEPT the image. Now feather the edge by choosing Select... Feather and choose something like 10 or 20 pixels. Hit Delete. The image will blend into the black background. You'll probably want to play with this a bit, and don't always use the same setting. For a large image 20 might be good whereas a smaller image may look better with 10.

Next play with erasing the edges. The Eraser is good to create the edges like that. Try using different brushes to get different effects, and just run the eraser along the edges. Play a bit with this to get an idea of what you want for effect. Play with brushes as well as diameter and softness. The softer a brush is the more it will blend into the background. Be random with your erase strokes.

Proceed to do the same thing with each image that will be part of the montage.

If you need more room click on Image... Canvas Size and increase it.

If you don't have much RAM you may want to Flatten the image after erasing the edges. But be warned - there's no going back after you flatten. If you can, don't flatten ever - keeping it in layers will make it possible to change and tweak things.

I'd highly recommend saving as a new file every once in a while. Montage1, Montage2, and so on. It's easy to mess up, so you'll be able to go back if you really mess up.

Have fun, and don't give up too easily. This is not an easy task! If you have any more questions feel free to ask.


PS: Make sure you post the results...

A couple of additional tips for this sort of thing -

1) If you have CS, the extract filter does a great job of extracting part of an image especially if it is shot against a contrasting plain background. Hair is the hard bit to extract and the extract filter does a pretty good job of things. Use the auto tool for most of it and switch auto off and paint over the hair with a biggish brush. Its not so bad if the colour of the target background is the same as the original but if the original was taken against a light background and the target is dark, the odd stray white pixel really shows up. The extract filter has edge clean up tools and you can change the background colour to white or black to see the effect as you clean it up. A bit of practice can produce some pretty clean cut outs with plenty of detail remaining where its needed.

2) if you open all the pictures you want to montage and cascade the windows, you can drag a layer from one over on to another, saves a couple of steps from select all>copy>paste

3) you will find that the brightness/contrast etc of different layers looks wrong when they are put together. If you go to the layers pallette and ALT click on the new adjustment layer icon and say choose levels, you get an adjustment layer that just applies to the layer that was active before the command. If you do that to all the layers you can adjust the brightness of each seperately. You could do the same with hue/saturation as its sometimes nice to take out some of the saturaration of the background layers.

4) the key to making montages look natural is to have nice soft edges to the cut-outs. A tip I got was to duplicate each cut out in a layer set and then apply a slight gaussian blur to the lower of the two. This causes the lower layer copy to spill out over the edges of the upper layer and softens the edges.

http://www.pbase.com/chris_bailey/image/40753994.jpg

I did this one for my eldest who was moaning that he had not been to London for ages and could we go this afternoon. I told him it was lunchtime so it was really too late.

There are five basic layers ( a plain grey background layer, the lads, the London backdrop, the grid and the clock) but each has at least one (most have two) adjustment layers.

The lads were extracted from a white background using the extract tool and the other layers added in behind. The grid has a gradient mask applied so that is fades across and the opacity of the clock has been reduced to about 30%. The london background has also had its opacity reduced to about 70% so the background grey tones it down so that is does not diminate.

Its not perfect as the white background they were shot against produced some backlighting but it took about 20mins and he was a happy bunny!