9.2. Making a Collage Putting individual pictures together in such a way that they create a feeling or tell a story is relatively easy. The main hurdle is collecting the photos you feel will tell that story. If you have to collect them from existing pictures, start by collecting as many as possible, then use Bridge to Light Table and winnow them. Pick the shots that do the most to tell the story you want to tell. If you are photographing a scene to turn it into a collage, think in terms of long, medium, and close-up shots. You want have as many perspectives as possible. For example, if your collage was intended to be a poster of a farmer's market, it might help to include a long shot of the venue. That long shot might even become a background over which all the other photos are imposed. Then you want to photograph both the prepared and the freshly picked foods. And, of course, you want some of the colorful or well-known participants in this event. NOTE Before you make a collage, it's a good idea to make sure you've done all the workflow steps that image is going to require. Duplicate and flatten the original before bringing into the collage. Otherwise, you could end up with hundreds of layers in the composite photo. Now you can start putting your collage together: Decide roughly how many images wide and how many images high you want your collage to be. Then decide what the full resolution width and height of the collage will be. Divide that width and height by about two-thirds of the full-resolution. Then you will know how many images you'll need for the entire composition. Assign a five-star rating on that number of images in Bridge. From Bridge's Unfiltered menu, choose Show 5 stars. Add a keyword that designates the name of the poster. (This will make it easier to find the same collection of images should you move onto to Lightroom, Aperture, Capture One, or some other image management program.) Open Photoshop and choose File New. The New dialog opens. Enter the width and height you want your final project to be and then complete all the other entries as shown in Figure 9-3. Figure 9-3. The New dialog for creating a new, black background for a collage. Start putting together your collage. Go to Bridge; only your five-star images should be showing. Press Cmd/Ctrl-A to select all. Now scroll down to make sure you haven't also collected folders and unrelated files from other Adobe CS applications. If you have, press Cmd/Ctrl-click on each of the strays to take them out of the collection. Now press Return/Enter to open all the five-star files in Photoshop. Drag each image onto the New background one at a time. The background will probably be larger than you want it to be, but that's a good thingit's much better to maintain fidelity by scaling down. Choose the Move tool and drag the new layer to the approximate location where you want it to be. Press Cmd/Ctrl-T. A Transform marquee will appear around your image. If you want to resize it proportionately, press Shift and drag a corner handle. If you want to rotate the image, place the cursor just outside a corner handle. When the cursor changes to a curved double-headed arrow, drag from side to side and watch it rotate. The further you drag from a corner, the more precisely you'll be able to rotate. To crop the image, make a selection in the shape you want to fit it inside of. Then invert the selection (Cmd/Ctrl-Shift-I) and click the Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. The layer mask is always a good idea in this application because you can modify it to show more or less of the image once the whole composite is arranged. Also, it's very easy to make a new mask without having to reload a new image. Repeat Steps 69 until all of your images are in place. If you want to hide one image behind another, go to the Layers palette and just drag its layer further down in the stack. You may have to do this several times to get all of the images in the right stacking order. Since you usually want all the outside images to be direct attention to the center of the collage. Often, you can do that by flipping the image horizontally. To do that, choose Edit TransformFlip Horizontal.
NOTE If you do a lot of collages, you may want to use the Shape tools to cut out images in certain shapes. You can even invent your own shapes and draw them with the Pen tool or in Adobe Illustrator. If you do it in Illustrator, you'll have to import the shapes into Photoshop (see Photoshop Help if you don't know how to do that). |
