Chapter 9. Collage and Montage

This chapter is all about compositing. Compositing, in the context of this book, is the art of montage and collage. Montage is "seamless" compositing that creates an image of a time, place, space, or person that never existed in reality. Collage is the art of putting together multiple images in such a way that their borders are obvious. I'll start with collage because it's such an easy process and illustrates so clearly the basis of compositing. Then I'll talk about techniques for making composites seamless, which is the art of montage.

Before we really get going I want to stress that, ethically, I only approve of montage techniques that are a matter of art or illustration. Montage techniques have no place in news publications, except where it is emphatically stated that they were created to illustrate an idea rather than fact. Figure 9-1 illustrates the difference between montage and collage.

Figure 9-1. The difference between a collage (left) and a montage (right). The collage is simply a collection of photos from the San Francisco Love Parade of 2005. The montage looks like a single photo, but the photo of the lady hula-hooper and the photo of the crowd were taken from different frames.

NOTE

You may think that montage is too time consuming or expensive to use very often. However, this art needs be no more complicated than adding clouds to a dull sky or placing some people or animals in the foreground of a scene to give it a better sense of context and place.

The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

As you probably guessed by now, a nondestructive image editing workflowonce you're past the image management, winnowing, and RAW adjustments stageis all about layering techniques and organization. A big part of that organization is keeping the order of layers so that they are created bottom-upfrom the least to most destructive. This chapter is about creating images that are pieced together from two or more separate photosespecially when the photos are combined in such a way to make the viewer think the photo is real. The practical applications range from illustration to creating locations that were previously out of reach. To keep your workflow nondestructive during this stage, be sure to make your composite a layer group above the background image. And be sure to keep each of your knockouts in its own layer group along with the layers for shadows and other effects.