Tips for Montages in Photoshop

Montages used to be made by physically clipping and cutting photographs, then arranging them, sometimes with glue, to either present as a whole or to be rephotographed. The idea often is to get a snapshot of a person's life or school life or summer camp by placing a lot of photos together. The theory is that these photos together make up something greater than the sum of their parts. Here are some ideas for making them in Adobe Photoshop.

Basics

There are two schools of thought about making montages and either is fine, depending on your perspective. The first is to sort your photos, choose which ones you want to combine into the montage, then determine the order in which they should go. Photos from a child's summer camp, for example, might loosely follow the chronology of the camp. The second way to choose photos for a montage is by grabbing them and throwing them together, maybe moving them around for a better fit or maybe just letting them fall where they may. Some interesting juxtapositions can come from the latter because the subconscious may have a role in it.

Resize

Once the photos are selected, it's a good idea to get them all to relatively the same size, particularly with resolution. Open each photo separately, go to "Image>Image Size" and set the width, height and resolution. If the montage is for the Internet, 72 dots per inch for each photo is OK. If you intend to print the montage, go to at least 200 dpi; 300 dpi is better. Save copies of all your photos in a workspace folder where you can access them.

Create

Open a big, new file ("File>New" and set size) in Photoshop. Then, open all the photos you intend to use. Using the Pointer tool on the side Toolbar, you can drag each photo onto your blank file. Each time you do this, you create a separate layer, allowing you to work with each photo separately by going to "Window>Layers." You can use the Crop tool or the Lasso to get rid of excess parts of the photo, without damaging any other layer. When you use the Lasso to cut away excess, consider using Feathering in the small box in the top toolbar. Select 20 or 30 px. When the cut is made, this will leave a soft fade for each photo. Using Transform under the Edit menu, you can twist, turn, scale and distort any individual layer. Arrange the photos as you like and save as a Photoshop (.psd) file to keep the layers separate. Then, go to "Layer>Flatten Layer." This will compress all the layers into one image. Save it under another name as a TIFF or JPEG file.

References

• Bringing Images Together for Montage