**Program Tutorials** : Digital Image Pro : *Technique

For the purposes of this tutorial you will need three to five photographs with a clear focal point and similar colouring.

Crop photographs to remove any distracting elements and focus on the subject.

Choose your canvas size ( I use 8x8) and consider the placement of the photographs. You want to keep the coverage of the page high but not obscure any of the photo focus. Make any adjustments to the photographs necessary to get an even colour tone.

Select a color from your photographs that will complement them and serve as a background. Here I used the color dropper tool to match a background to the colour of the grass.

Before you start you may like to make a copy of the layout as is by using Edit>Duplicate Whole Picture. This gives you an exact copy that you can then copy and paste photographs from in case you need to delete work on the original and start again.

To create the montage blend the tool to use is Effects>Transparency > Gradual.

This gives you several options of directional fade. Your control over the effects is actually quite limited. You can not increase or decrease the size of the effect, only invert or flip the direction.

Now you can begin to fade the photographs into each other. The process is not an exact science so it takes a lot of experimentation.

You have the copy to replace photographs with or to start all over with. Any effect does not take place to you elect done so don’t be afraid to manipulate the photographs.

I started with the photograph in the top left corner which I consider the strongest photograph. I have applied the circular gradient and flipped it so the strongest part is in the center of the photograph. This has shrunk my photograph so I have resized it to overlap the edges of the neighboring pictures and the edge of the page.

For the bottom left image I have chosen a diagonal gradient so that it merges into the photograph above.

For the photograph on the right top side I used a horizontal gradient and then resized the image.

The photograph on the bottom left had a gradient applied that kept the strength in the center line fading out horizontally and again was resized.

The results of the montage are below.

To add interest and fill gaps in the montage I selected several images from the DIP gallery, you could also choose anything you like to complement the theme of your layout.

To blend the images in it’s generally only necessary to use the Effects> Transparency> Even tool though you could still apply gradient effects if for example you are adding textures. You can move the images up and down the stack for best effect. For particular areas you could use the transparency brush, Effects>transparency>brush and adjust the settings for the desired effect to increase the transparency of specific areas. Add any title or journaling. I applied transparency to the font as well.

The final layout is a simple montage.

You should find that you can use these basic techniques to create more elaborate montages.

 Credits:

Layout font: SBB Amy

Floral Images: Microsoft Digital Image Pro gallery.