Technique Tuesday - Photoshop Tips by Karen Grunberg
Making a Photo Collage
As many of you know, I spent the whole month of December making plans with my son and husband and taking lots of photos so I could create a daily album. In the month of December alone, I took over 6000 photos. Now that the month has come and gone, I have a beautiful minibook full of all of our memories. Even though, I love my book, I also wanted to have a layout that I could put in my album and be able to capture the feeling of this wonderful December.
As I just mentioned, I took a lot of photos, so choosing one over the others wasn't going to be an easy feat. After pondering for a while, I decided that I didn't have to choose one; I was going to create a photo collage of some of my favorite photos that have the strongest memories.
I knew I wanted the collage to be an 8x8 so it could fit into a 12x12 page with some room for a title, etc. I didn't want each of the photos to be too tiny so that meant they'd be 2x2 so a little bit of quick math told me that I'd be able to fit 16 photos in my collage. I went through my photos and chose the 16 that I thought was the best representation of our 31 days and opened them all up in Photoshop. (I use Adobe Photoshop but these steps should work without a problem in Photoshop Elements, too.)
Then I opened a new document and set the size to be 8 inches by 8 inches with 300 Resolution. 300 is about the right resolution for a crisp, clean photo to print. For the web, you don't need anything higher than 150, but if you're printing a photo, I recommend 300.
Now I had 17 photos open. 16 that will go into my collage and the one 8x8 that will be my collage. I then clicked on one of the photos I planned to put in my collage and chose the crop tool from the Tools list.
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Now I had 17 photos open. 16 that will go into my collage and the one 8x8 that will be my collage. I then clicked on one of the photos I planned to put in my collage and chose the crop tool from the Tools list.
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This tool allows you to select a certain portion of the photo and "crop" it out so that only that section becomes the full photo. It also allows you to predefine a size for this selection. I set mine to be 2 inches wide and 2 inches tall with a resolution of 300.
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Here's how my layout turned out:
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Finally, I added some Pink Paislee stickers to write out December and some tiny alphabets to write out the rest of my title.
And voila! we're done. It's a simple layout but it carries all my memories from December and I can turn to my minibook for all the detailed journaling.
1 comment:
thanks for inspiration karen!
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