How To

Last week a friend asked me to explain how I did the collage.  I wrote a lovely e-mail explaining step by step.  I didn’t know if my friend had the same type of Photoshop as mine or how much they used it so I told them each step as if they had just popped the program onto their computer.  Well, I got up to get a cup of coffee and when I came back my screen was dark and a quick swipe on the mouse pad didn’t revive my blue lights.

I have cord issues, well not for right now, Dirt got out his soldering gun and fixed it, again.  But, when it is frayed, if my battery is low and something moves my cord, like me getting up to get coffee and brushing the tablecloth, there goes my work I didn’t save.

So here I am, rewriting and fulfilling a verbalized request directly on the blog in case there were other un-verbalized requests.

Mind you, I am no expert, either in photography, digital or otherwise or in Photoshop.  To top it all off I use terms like thingamajiggy with abandon, even it I do know its name.  So we’ll see how this works out, me writing a how to.

But if you want to make a collage like this one that I used for my header challeng and you have Photoshop Elements 6 or something close enough for horseshoes, then lets get goin’ shall we?

I saw that I could make the modern wall-frame sort of collage in the “create” portion of PS e6, but because I was a collage queen in art class that wasn’t what I wanted (my first collage assignment in seventh grade was to make a collage using food items, one of the items I chose was sugar cubes, to really give the collage an even bigger sense of three dimensions and geometry.  My art teacher said they would fall off.  They didn’t, not that day in class, not the next day when she finally got around to grading them, not a month later when we got to take them home and I had to store mine in my locker and then haul it home on the bus.  They didn’t fall off the whole time it hung in my room as a continual encouragement to experiment and try stuff most folks think won’t work.  That is why I love collages.)

But because of a thing that Tia sort of showed me I knew I could accomplish something closer to what I was looking for.  So from the Organizer I sent a couple of pictures to Editor by clicking on the ones I wanted to work with and clicking the Fix button top right corner and then clicking Full Edit on the sidebar.   Note: if you have a lot of pictures to move to Editor you can move them all at once by clicking on them as you hold down ctrl, they will all stay highlighted and then when you click Fix-Full Edit, Editor will open and they will all be deposited there.

Once in Editor the pictures you selected will appear at the bottom in the Project Bin.  Click on the one you want as your background making it appear on the main screen.  Oh wait, first up at the top where it says File, Edit, Image…  you will see a menu button that says Window.  Click on it.  Then make sure that in its drop down Layers is marked, if not click on it to mark it and open up the layers screen on the side bar to the right.

Okay, now double click on the picture you want as your background.  Have fun with it as you get to know it.  Crop it, adjust the lighting, color, etc.  If you haven’t been over here in Edit mode before do some exploring, if your exploring and experimenting makes it look nutty, just hit the Undo button and start over or start from before it went all wonky.

Now for the pictures, you’re going to put on top of your background.  Double click them, one at a time, fixing them up for the spot you think you want them to be in, crop, color, remove color, enhance the lighting, all that stuff that makes your good picture even better.  You can get them all ready or work with one at a time.  When you’re ready to put a picture on your background picture…

Double click your background picture in the project bin.  That will bring it up on the main screen.

Now go back down to the project bin and click and drag a prepped image up into the background.  Don’t freak out if it is way bigger than you wanted it or if it didn’t land just where you thought it would.  See the dotted lines around it and the little squares in the corners and middle of the sides? Those are just like the ones you see when you crop or adjust an image.  So now you can shrink it or grow it however you like, just remember, in order to keep the right proportions you have, grab a corner square and drag it out or push it in evenly.  So now you know when prepping an image, you don’t crop for size, you crop for placement of the subject and removal of unnecessary stuff.

While you are still clicked on the image you just placed, you can also use that corner square to tilt your image, just move the cursor a little farther until the diagonal line turns into a little curve line and then whoopdy woo, have a go at turning it all over the place.

Speaking of place and moving, I hope you just figured out that you can adjust the placement of the image on the background.  Just make sure you are in the hand mode or the pointer mode (see the vertical tool bar on the left side, both are at the top).  In fact, I’ll say right now that when you are in Editor if you are trying to make some thing happen and it isn’t working like it ought to, most likely you are clicked on the wrong tool from the tool bar on the left.  I pretty much find that I need to calm down and remember to click on the pointer tool, then my life goes much smoother.

So now you’re ready to put more pictures in and from now on we’ll call the main thing the collage. 

First, look over to the right hand side and see your layers window.  You should have two images there, one is the background and the other is the image you just put on the background. 

If you click on the background layer in the layer window and then add another image like you did before (click on the next image you have prepped in the project bin and drag up to the collage) This new image will be underneath the first image you placed on the background if you happen to move the two so that they overlap.  Try it. 

You can make them switch dominance by changing their placing in the layers window, just click on one of the images, drag and drop it into the position you want.  This becomes rather important when you have lots of images in your collage and are trying for that random tucked in or scrambled on the dining room table effect.  You can easily figure out which one is which (the image is rather small over in the layers window) by clicking on the image in the main window, it will highlight that image in the layers window. 

So now go ahead a load a bunch of images into the collage.  Oh, if you miss and accidentally put an image on top of an image it replaces the one that was there, click undo and try placing again.  Remember, once you drop and drag an image up to the collage you can resize and reposition it.  You can do that at any ol’ time, just click on the image in the collage that you wish to resize or reposition.  Just remember you need to be clicked on to the pointer or the hand over on the left side tool bar.  (I’m often clicked on one of the other editing tools, like the crop tool and then I wonder why my clicking and moving is futile. (Oops I’m repeating myself, oh well I do that mistake a lot so maybe it bares repeating.))

Keep clicking and adding, don’t forget you can always delete, and you can use one image more than once.

When you like what you see and your sure you are all done.  Flatten the Image! Here’s how.  With your finished collage in the main window, go back up at the top of your screen, where it says File, Edit, Image, Enhance…. ya, click on Layer, at the bottom of the drop down is the word flatten image.  Click on that. Now you’re flat and the computer size of a regular picture.  If you skip this step your collage most likely will not load onto things like blogs and take up a lot of space, or at least that is what I’m told.  I do know about the “will not load” thing personally however.

Well I think I’ve told you everything I learned the day I sat myself down to fulfill an assignment.  I’m going to continue to explore, I hope you do to.  And if you ever see a picture that you want to know how I got there, feel free to ask, I have no secrets.  But if I forget to tell you, Clever Reader please, bug me, I was born with that forgetting disease, and I forget how to spell it.  And speaking of spelling, I have a spelling bone to pick with whomever will listen, but I’ll wait for another time.