News & Guides
Create a Photo Canvas Montage!
08 March 2011
Canvas Ideas: Create your own "Photo Montage"!
So you want to print a treasured family memory on canvas - but you can't decide which one? If you're considering multiple snapshots of friends or family as canvas photo printing pieces, why not build a photo-montage? A photo montage looks great in the living room and saves you some cash at the same time!
To create a photo montage, you will require some digital image editing software. The software most people use in order to manipulate photos is Adobe Photoshop. Although photo canvas printing does not require full imaging software, creating a photo-montage does! It’s also worth noting that most computers have image manipulation software installed as standard and although our instructions are specific to Photoshop the advice can easily be applied to the software you plan to use.
In Photoshop click "File", and then "New". You will be presented with a dialog box. Here, you can input the height and width of your new image before you start working on it. Click the dropdown box next to "height" or "width" and select "inches".
Go to the 48 Hour Canvas "upload your image" page. Mouse over "select the canvas size" to view the available canvas sheet sizes. Decide which one you'll be purchasing, and then enter those dimension into the "height" and "width" fields in the Photoshop dialog box (opened previously).
Click "ok". Now you have created your photo-montage project! Click "view" and then "actual pixels". This will show your photo canvas printing montage project at actual (real-life) proportions.
Open some of your favourite family snapshots in Photoshop (they will be placed into new tabs). You'll want to open up enough to fill your canvas entirely. Click on the tab for one of your family snapshots...
Hold down "ctrl" and "a" on your keyboard, this will select the entire snapshot. Hold down "ctrl" and "c" to copy the image. Return to your canvas-montage project. Hold down "ctrl" and "v" to paste your family snapshot onto your photo-montage, it will be added on a new layer.
It's important that your canvas photo printing snapshots are the correct size for your canvas montage! With your snapshot's layer selected, hold down "ctrl" and "t". This will create a "transform" box around your snapshot. Using this, you can rotate and re-size the snapshot so that it fits perfectly onto your photo-montage. If you want to re-size your snapshot whilst perfectly maintaining its proportions, hold down "shift" as you re-size it.
Repeat the snapshot pasting process as many times as you deem necessary to fill your photo canvas montage. After you're done pasting, rotate some of your snapshots at 'jaunty' angles to give your montage some character. Then, drag some of the snapshot layers around to make the piece feel more natural!
If you'd like a border around your snapshots, select the layer for one of your snapshots and click the "Layer" menu. Next click "Layer Style" and then "Outer Glow". Change the colour of the glow from dull electric yellow to pure white using the colour selection tool. Increase the opacity of the glow from 75% to 100%.Drag the "spread" from 0% to 100%. Once all this is done, you will have a prominent border around your snapshot. Drag the "size" slider until you are happy with the size of your snapshot's border. You're done!
Once you're finished tweaking your canvas photo printing montage, click "file" and then "save as". Use the drop-down box to select "JPEG" as your file-type. Type in a file-name and click "save". In the following dialog box, set the image quality to 12 (maximum) and select a "standard" baseline. Click "ok".
Now all you have to do is to go back to your web-browser and upload your image to our "upload your image" page using the same "canvas size" which you used to create your photo-montage project...
The end! Enjoy your photo canvas print montage...