Creating Advanced Montage Prints

A “Basic” or “Intermediate” montage has straight, orderly columns and rows of pictures. These montages are very easy to create and visually “comfortable” for the viewer.

“Advanced” montage enlargements have a diversity of picture shapes, sizes, backgrounds, and visual effects. They may also contain type in a wide range of fonts. This can help personalize the montage for an individual, organization or as a memory of an event. The overall effect of an “Advanced” montage is that it has a more “artistic” look.

Our recommendation is that you create “Advanced” montages by starting with a basic design and then modifying the design to add more interesting graphic design elements.

There are several ways you can go from basic to advanced design:

1) Change the numerical definitions in the Montage Set-up window with nodes that either have gaps or no gaps between them.

Then…

2) Use the Edit tool to select individual nodes. Modify the sizes, shapes, rotation, opacity or other characteristics of the image nodes. You will probably also want to remove some image nodes so that you can enlarge other nodes.

Note that these two techniques can be used in conjunction with one another.

3) Use the Text tool to create text nodes, where you’ll be able to personalized type. You’ll do this by removing a picture node and creating the text node in its place. Another technique when adding text is to draw an image node over your montage using the Draw tool to create a visual background and then draw a text node within the image node with the Text tool.

4) Include image or fill content in the background node to bring in color or a large photograph. (Note that you may also choose not to include a background image or fill.)

Use the Node tool to convert a color photograph to black & white. Then, the Opacity tool may be used to lighten the background image so that the foreground images stand out.

Use the Fill tool to select and change your background to a specified color.

Let’s go into some examples of how these techniques can be used. Your starting point will be to open up a montage from My Templates (if you have any montages saved) or follow us by simply clicking on the Montage tool and specify the 3 across by 4 down setting with zeros in the other settings on a 16” x 20” Design Your Own print.

Changing the Set-up Window Definitions

Here’s the set-up window we used for our basic 16” x 20” montage and the layout these settings produced:

Now let’s look at the layout we would get by changing some of the slider positions:

This is obviously a powerful tool!

Now you can click on the Edit tool to select any of the individual nodes to change its size, placement or layer position. You can also make these changes later, at any time before or after you’ve dropped your pictures in place, by toggling back and forth on the Pager button. Nodes may also be removed by right-clicking with a PC or Command/Control-clicking with a Mac and selecting Remove from the pop-up menu.

Use the numerical settings to add borders or change the gaps between nodes if you just want to vary “square” layouts. Then, modify individual node shapes with the Edit tool.(Just remember that if you create gaps, white space will show though from the background unless you fill it with an image or a fill.)