I gave the Ultimate Summer Challenge at the Scrapbooks Etc. website another go this week, and again my layout was selected for the top ten. (You can vote for my layout here, if you are so inclined. Thanks!)
The challenge this week was to use at least eight photos on a layout. I’m thinking now that I might have gone a bit overboard. Here’s my layout:
To be published in Scrapbooking & Beyond.
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Supplies: Patterned paper—Scenic Route; chipboard letters—Crate Paper; bracket—Everlasting Keepsakes; circle—Gin-X. The star charms were salvaged from some costume jewelry I found at a flea market.
There are ninety-eight photos on this page. Yes, ninety-eight. (Twelve rows of eight photos each, plus two extra on the right side of the collage.) It’s an all-time record for me, and I think this record is going to stand for quite a while.
Creating the photo collage (and printing it on letter-size photo paper) wasn’t difficult, but it was time-consuming. Here’s how I did it, using Photoshop Elements 3.0 (Macintosh). I suspect that the software has batch-processing tools that would have made this process less monotonous, but I did it the long way.
Directions:
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1. Select 98 photos. They should all be in the portrait format or capable of being cropped as portraits. In other words, no horizontal shots.
2. Open a new document in Photoshop Elements, 6 x 12 inches, 300 dpi resolution.
3. Using the Browser, drag the photos you’ve selected into the Photo Bin.
4. Open the first photo and either (a) resize it to .667 x 1 inch, or (b) crop it to that size. Make the resolution 300 dpi.
5. Drag the photo to your 6 x 12-inch document, and position it in the top left corner. Place subsequent photos in line so that they just butt against one another, with no overlap and no space between.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 ninety-seven times. The final two photos go on the right side of the collage, at the ends of the center two rows.
7. Zoom in on the document, and look it over carefully to be sure that the photos line up neatly. Make adjustments by clicking on a photo and nudging it with the arrow keys.
8. Before printing, decide where you want the seam. Select the top portion of the collage, plus another row of photos, copy, and paste into a new letter-size document. Repeat for the rest of the collage, rotating one or both layers so they fit on the same piece of photo paper.
9. After printing, trim the two pieces of the photo collage, and piece them together for your layout.
If you give this a try, link me up and let me know how it goes. And thanks for voting here.
