Time now for you to demonstrate your wonderful creativity with some compositions of your own! I expect you to create at least two original images. Both images should be a montage of several images combined into one. See further down this page for advice on making montages. Each montage image you make must include text that you have added yourself. Since you will be adding the text yourself, the images you use should be initially text-free so that I know the text in the finished product was added by you. Both images should demonstrate your skill in making accurate selections. This project work is your main chance to be creative with Paint Shop Pro in class and will carry a heavy weighting in terms of grades. You should spend several lessons on this project.

You may choose to make montage images for any two of the following

Follow the 'Student Work' links above to see some work by my Mexican students (aged 17-18) of previous years. Do you think you can do better? Prove it!

You are welcome to use images downloaded off the internet, but you will find 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. Better still ,instead of including 'wallpaper' in your search text, use Google image search and simply specify that you want to see only large images. If you find any good sites for FREE wallpaper then please let me know.

You may also choose to work with large images from my 'image banks' at the top of this page.

Making a montage

It's likely that you will often want to combine several images into one to create a 'montage'. I don't expect you to download any of these pictures below and manipulate them - I DO expect to find this page useful when you are making your own montage pictures.

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)? I'll tell you the difference later, and how I dealt with it.

Here are the details of how the image was put together:

1. 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.
   
   

2. Then I carefully selected shapes from each of the other pictures, using first the freehand selection tool with selection type 'point to point' and then tidying up the selection by using the freehand selection tool with selection type 'freehand' to add to or subtract from the initial selection. I used a setting of 1 for the feathering to soften the edges slightly.
   
   

3. I copied the selections and pasted each one into the master image as a new layer by pressing Ctrl-L. This gave me a stack of layers on top of the background.
   
   

4. To modify each layer, I clicked the name of the layer and then used the deform tool to change the size of each selection. Drag the corner handles with the right mouse button not the left to preserve the shape of each selection even as you change its size, but be aware that Paint Shop Pro has a bug which causes the shape to change sometimes even though you correctly drag a corner with the right mouse button. In some cases I flipped the selection horizontally with Image > Mirror. I moved each image into its final position with the move tool .
   
   

5. The difference between the two pictures above 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 (I also faded the bottom of the monstrous figure, top right). So, what is the easiest way to do this? Making the skirt fade away at the bottom really means deleting part of this image so why not use the eraser tool for this? I set the size of the tool very large (200) and the hardness to zero - this gives the tool very soft edges, similar to the idea of a feathered selection. Then I clicked the bottom left corner of the skirt, then Shift-clicked the bottom right of the skirt. This technique (click then shift-click) is a way of using any tool to draw a line. In this way I used the eraser in a straight line across the bottom of the skirt to get the faded affect. Clever stuff!
   
   

6. I added titles with effects (see the text lesson earlier)
   
   

7. I saved a PSP version in case I wanted to make any changes, then saved another version in jpeg format - you should do the same so that you can add your image to your website.

   

   If you would like to study Paint Shop Pro in more detail, try the help system (Help > Help Topics) or the Learning System (Help > Learning System or F10).

   

That's all, folks! I hope you enjoyed this part of the course.