9 Montage

Time now for you to demonstrate your wonderful creativity with some compositions of your own! I expect you to create at least one original image with the following characteristics:

	The image should be an advertisement, complete with text. It could advertise, for example, a holiday destination, your local village (take some photos yourself and scan them in school), a brand of car, of toothpaste, whatever you like! It could even be a magazine cover, complete with your face!
	The image should be a montage of several images combined into one. See further down this page for advice on making montages.
	The image should demonstrate your skill in making accurate selections.

You are welcome to use images downloaded off the internet, but please don't use images that already contain text otherwise I may not be able to tell what text you have added yourself. A problem with many images ion the internet is that they are usually rather small compared to the ones you have used in this course. To find images of a good size, try searching for 'wallpaper' - for example you could do a search for 'wallpaper cars' if you want large pictures of cars. If you find any good sites for FREE wallpaper then please let me know.

Warning: When you copy images from the internet and paste them into your website you may actually be pasting a LINK to the original picture rather than the actual picture. This has the advantage that the link takes up almost no space on your site but there is a catch: if the original picture is moved or renamed then your link will fail. To avoid this problem here is a useful trick: after pasting the picture (or a link to the picture - it's not easy to tell) click the picture and then twice click the 'Flip vertical' tool in the Pictures toolbar at the bottom of the screen . This will turn the picture upside down and then the right way up, tricking FrontPage into thinking you have modified the picture so that when you save the page the picture will definitely be saved as a picture file, and not just a link.

Making a montage

It's likely that you will often want to combine several images into one to create a 'montage'.

The image below is a montage of several photographs, all taken in Bali, Indonesia. (Bali is a small Hindu enclave in this otherwise Muslim country, and it also happens to be the most photogenic place I know). It is intended to be an ad for the traditional dancing that goes on in the town of Ubud (pronounced 'oobood'), in the center of the island.

I spent a long time on this picture, so I hope you like it! It was made by combining elements from the pictures at the bottom of this page. Look at the picture below and you will see what I was trying to avoid - can you spot the difference (apart from the size, duh)?

The difference is in the skirt of the man at the top left - I wanted to avoid the sharp edge at the bottom of the skirt but the original picture stopped there, so I made the skirt fade away for the final image. Here are the details of how the image was put together, including how to fade the edges of components (I also faded the bottom of the monstrous figure, top right).

	I wanted a background that would be interesting and colorful but not distracting - by blurring (Gaussian blur) the photo below I was able to keep the greens that are so typical of the island, while eliminating the distracting detail. I also darkened the lightest parts of the background using the curves control, so that the background would not contain any boring white areas.
	Then I carefully selected shapes from each of the other pictures, using first the magnetic lasso and then tidying up the selection by using the regular lasso tool to add to or subtract from the initial selection. I used a setting of 1 for the feathering to soften the edges slightly.
	I copied and pasted the selections into the master image, on top of the background, creating a stack of layers.
	To modify each layer, I clicked the name of the layer and then used the scale tool (Tools>Transform Tools>Scale or Shift+T) to change the size of each selection. Iin some cases I flipped the selection horizontally.
	So far, the selections still have hard edges - to get the faded edges you saw in the final image I choose the appropriate layer (the dancer stabbing himself while in a trance, for example), then switched to Quick Mask mode. I applied a linear gradient to the quick mask, so that the protective mask would be thick (darker red) towards the bottom of the picture. Then I returned to standard mode, copied the selection (the entire layer) and pasted it again, knowing that the unmasked areas of the copied layer would be copied and pasted as opaque, and the masked areas would be copied and pasted as somewhat transparent. Clever stuff!
	I deleted the two layers that I had copied and pasted to give the faded effect, leaving the faded layers.
	Moved each image into its final position with the move tool.
	Added titles and effects.
	I saved an XCF version in case I wanted to make any changes, then saved the picture in jpeg format.