Creating a Photo Collage for Father’s Day or any Special Occasion

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[Creating a photo collage for any special event] [male speaker] With Father's Day fast approaching, I thought that in this session we could look at some great new ways of presenting some of those terrific family shots that you have in your albums, I'm sure, as a celebration for the day. Take this particular image that you can see on screen now. What we're going to do is actually create a montage type look where we break down the image into separate bits and put them into little frames and then place them back onto the page with a drop shadow and reconnect them all, a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, in order to get a montage or collage effect for the actual photo itself. We're going to do that using a piece of technology in Photoshop Elements that many of you probably are aware of if you create photo books. But if you don't create photo books, then you might not really know that the feature is there. If we go across to the Content panel in the full edit mode, you can see that we have a range of different types of content that we can add to our documents. Included in that is a set of frames, and these frames are often used in photo books to just highlight or feature particular images. And they're very easy to use. Take, for instance, this example image that we have here already. All of the different parts of the composition are made up with different frames. And using frames is as simple as going and getting your Move tool, clicking and dragging a frame across to a particular image-- say, for instance, this one here--and just let it go, and the frame will be substituted for the one that was there before. Framing technology not only provides us with the ability to get a different look to our photos, but it also has some special features built in to the technology which helps us with our images. And I just want to show you in particular what this does. Here I've got the same image. Let me show you the Layers palette. I've got two versions of it. The one that I have selected at the moment is just the photo sitting on a new layer. I'm going to make this image smaller, and then I'm going to make it larger again. And I'm going to do that a couple of times, and I want you to see what happens to the photo. You'll see that each time that we do a change to the image the image itself is actually resampled. And I hope you can see that now it is a lot less quality than what we started with, because each time we change or rotate or adjust the photo when it's sitting on a normal layer, then it resamples the photo and eventually we end up with less quality than what we started with. That's not the same with frames. Here I've got a second version of the image, but this time it's placed within a frame layer. But it doesn't have the decorative frame that you can see here. It's just a way of positioning the image. If I do the same activity where I'm making the picture bigger and smaller and I'll do that several times, notice what's happening to the photo. Each time that I resize the frame, the original image has all the quality of the original photo that I placed there. Let's compare it with the one beneath. That's the one where we're just changing the size of the actual layer itself. This is the one where we're actually working with frames. So even if you don't want the decorative quality that we get when using frames, placing your images onto your document using a frame with no border provides you with the ability to push and pull those images around as much as you like and guarantee that the quality of those images remains the same. That's enough about the technology. Let's go and actually create the image itself. So the first thing we want to do is go up to File, then down to New, across to Blank File. I'm going to create something that's approximately 10x8 inches so I can print it out on photo paper and around about 240dpi, which suits my printer. We'll have a white background and we'll call this father and son print. Click OK. I want to make sure I've got enough room to play with, so I'm just going to grab the Crop tool now and just drag out a crop marquee and then just drag it a little bit sidewards so I've got a little bit of room on the side to play with and then just click the green Commit button. The first thing I want to do is go up to my Content panel and go and look for the frames that I want to work with. There's an absolute ton of frames that you can play with here, and some of them you'll notice have a little yellow band across the right-hand corner. These are frames that are only available to Plus members. The rest of the frames that you see here are available to all Photoshop Elements users. If you want to track down the frame that you're working with, you can either go through and select them from the list that's here, or I know the one that I want to work with, so I'm just going to go down to By Word, I'm going to do a search by word, I'm going to turn off all of the other types of content and just leave the Filter for Frames option that you can see there. Click Find for white, and you can see that these are all of the frames that are white frames that I can use in my document. The particular one that I'd like to use is this one here. It's just a basic white with a 20 pixel border. The reason why I'm using that--and I'm just going to drag it across to my document-- is that it will give me enough definition so that I can see it's a frame, but the border of the frame won't distract from the image too much. So I'm just going to select the frame itself, just click on the frame, then drag in to make the frame smaller and then just drag it across to the side here. You'll notice in doing so that my white background has disappeared and we just have a transparent background. If we go over to Layers and have a look, the background layer that we started with has now been converted to this special frame layer. I still want a background layer so I can see the effect of the frame sitting on the background, so I'm just going to click on the Create New Layer button at the bottom of the Layers panel. Click and drag that new layer down so it sits beneath the frame layer that I created, then go across to Layer and then down to New and Background From Layer. And notice because I have white as my background color swatch, then a new background was created and filled with white. Now we can see our frame sitting here against the white background. I'm just going to drag our photo now from the Project Bin up to the frame, and automatically it gets placed into the frame. Very cool. But I would like the shadow to be a bit stronger for this frame so that we really get a sense of depth in our collage. I'll just go across here to the Layers panel to the frame layer and double click on the FX icon that you can see there. We have the ability to adjust the style settings used for this particular frame. You can see here we've got a drop shadow entry, and so I'm just going to increase the size of the drop shadow, increase the distance a little bit, and increase the opacity setting, that is, to make it darker so we get a bit more definition for the drop shadow. I'll now click OK, and here we've got our basic frame. But because we want to show only a portion of the image in the frame, I want to make this photo larger within the frame itself. So if I double click, you'll notice that we get a floating toolbar that sits above the actual picture itself. And notice that if I now click and drag, instead of the frame and the picture being resized, it's just the picture being resized within the frame itself. So this gives me the opportunity to increase the size of the photo so that I can just show a portion of it when I put the collage together. I'm going to do this by number so that I can keep consistent all of the images that I am going to put together in the collage. So instead of just dragging out the edge of the picture in this way to scale it, I'm going to go up to the Options bar. You'll see how we've got some percentage settings here, and I'm just going to type in 200 for 200%. The image gets bigger, then I click on the green tick, and that is now committed. So we've got the original frame size, and then we've got the photo sitting at 200% magnification or scaled up to 200% inside that frame. So now I want to duplicate this whole frame together with its drop shadow settings and the way that I've rescaled the picture within it. I'm just going to go across to the Layers panel, click on that frame layer, and just drag it down to the New Layer button. Notice that we get a copy, and we can click and just drag that away on our document so that we can see that copy. I'm going to do that multiple times so that we end up with multiple versions of the same picture and frame combination. At this point it doesn't really matter how many you do. I know that I'll need several in order to make this composition work. So at this point I'm just going to go and hit and make about 8 of these copies so that I'll end up with more than enough when I'm actually playing around with my composition to be able to build up the montage. The important thing about this is that we end up with the same types of frames with the picture at the same scale. Then I'm going to take one of these images, drag it across, and just drop it around about the center of the composition. I'm going to double click inside the frame, which selects the picture itself, and just get the key part of the image sitting in the middle of the frame. So in this case I want both father and son's faces in the frame itself. If you can't get the exact positioning with your mouse, remember you can use your up and down and sideways arrows to get just smaller movements as well. So here I want to get both faces sitting center in frame. That's the most important part of the picture. And from here we'll then layer the other photos. So this particular frame should sit right on top. Notice in the Layers palette it's actually sitting around about the middle of the layer stack. I'm going to click on that layer and just drag it to the very top of the layer stack. That way, all the other frames will sit beneath it. Let's go and grab another frame now, and I'm just going to drag it down here for the moment. Double click on it, and just drag the picture within the frame so that it's sitting up to the left-hand corner of the photo. Click the green Commit button, and then I can drag this image so that it's sitting just approximately where it should be within the reconstructed montage. I want to change the angle of that slightly, so I move my cursor just outside of one of the corner handles of the photo, and you'll see it changed to a double-headed arrow with a slight curve on it. This enables me to rotate the frame and the picture together until we get it just the way that we want it. Then we click the green Commit button to apply that change. I'll go and grab another image, double click on it, drag it down to the other corner. Looking good. Commit that change, drag it up, get it roughly in the position where we want it, move outside of that frame, do a little bit of a rotation, adjust the position that it's sitting in, and then apply. It's looking pretty good. Let's now go for just at the top of the image. Double click again, drag down. Looking good. Apply that change, move that up into position just at the top of the boy's head. Looking good. We might want that one to sit beneath the other two that you see here on either side. We'll go over to the Layers palette again, and notice that the highlighted layer is the one that we've just been working with. And we can click and drag that beneath all of the other layers, and it's now sitting in the background. That's looking great. Now let's work down the sides. And it's the same way of working. This time I'm just moving over to the edge. That looks good. Drag it up, let's put it into position. And I might drop that one down as well, so let's drop it down the stack a little bit. That's looking great. That now makes me adjust the position just a little bit. Looks good. Let's go to the one on the left-hand side, move across. Great. Apply that, drag it into position. I might change the angle just slightly just to give us a different look. And then apply that, drop it down the stack a little bit so it's sitting in the background, and we're going really well. Let's now move down the photo. Let's go down to the bottom now. Click the green Commit, drag that into place. Great. I just put a slight angle on that. That's looking good. I want something that looks a little organic. I think we might need one more of these frames, so I'm just going to drag this frame down to the New Layers button at the bottom of the Layers palette again. That will mean that I can actually go to the bottom right-hand corner and the bottom left-hand corner and add those in to the mix. Let's go through, drop those in, and drop it down to pretty much the bottom of the pack and go to the other side as well with our final one. Looking good. Apply that, go over to the left-hand side, get it sitting where it should, and we're looking really good. So that's the way that we create the composition. I love what's happening in there. You can add some text in if you wish. Or if you're going to end up hanging in on the wall in yet another frame, then we can just come back through and crop that down, and we end up with the final composition. And remember, because all of these are separate layers and they're all in frame layers, we can go and push and pull this design around as much as we like in order to end up with the final composition without any worries about what's happening to the photo or the quality of the photo that we have there. So good luck with making your collage. I'm sure that you'll be able to get this type of effect just as easily on your desktop as I've been able to do it on mine.

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