CREATING A PHOTO MONTAGE

You can either use your own photos or you can download the ones used in this tutorial here (these photographs are listed as being Royalty and Copyright Free.  Should anyone know different, please contact the webmaster and they will be replaced).

We've all seen some wonderful photograph montages on our travels through the internet.  This is an extremely easy technique, yet one that can have awesome effects.  Bear in mind when selecting pictures, the color of the various backgrounds and how they might interact together.  There are a couple of simple techniques for using even those photographs whose backgrounds might not merge well, which I will share with you during the course of this tutorial.

Photo 1

Photo 2

Photo 3

Photo 4

Step 1

Open the Ocean View Photograph and make a background copy of it.  We are not going to make any alterations to this photo, it is our backdrop.

Step 2

Open up the lightning photo and drag and drop it onto the Ocean View Photo.

Step 3

With the lightning layer highlighted, click on the quick mask icon near the bottom of your tool bar.

Step 4

Select the gradient tool and drag it from left to right across the lightning.  The left side of the canvas will show red.

Step 5

Now click on the Edit in Standard Mode Icon.  Marching ants will appear, hit delete.  Voila, your first fade.  You want to repeat the quick mask mode, dragging gradient from right to left this time, clicking back on Edit in Standard Mode, deleting.  Repeat from Top to bottom.  How often you do this depends on the kind of effect you want. 

Step 6

Drag and drop the second photo onto the Ocean View Background.  Use  the quick mask mode and gradient tool first from left to right, then repeating from right to left. 

Step 7

You will notice that this has a much darker background compared with the Ocean View Photograph.  You could repeat the masking procedure, but of course this will keep fading the image.  Instead we will make a rectangular selection of the photo, then go to Select/Feather, and enter a value of 30.   The go to Select/Inverse, and hit the delete key 3 times.  You can see the result below.

Step 8

Open your final photo and repeat steps 6-7 for the leopard.

Your Montage should now look something like this.

That was so easy, wasn't it :O-)  I have a quick tip to include with this tutorial.  If you want to 'extract' part of an image from a photograph for your collages, try using the pen tool to trace.  I find it much easier to control than the extract function.  Each time you click the pen tool on the outline of the object, it leaves an anchor point

Once you have traced the outline of the object using this method, and click back on the start point, it will be outlined like this (Mine is not perfect, I'd normally take more time with my outline).

In the 'Path' palette, control click on the layer which will make it a selection.  You can now copy and paste it into your collage.

That's it for now :O-)  I hope you all have great fun playing around with your photos using these techniques.

Luv & Light - Dreamcatcher