Any digital artistes out there care to share their expertise? I’d like to find software that is good for preparing a photo collage. I’d like the software to keep track of each collage element separately so that it can be repositioned or rotated but in the end I’d like to smash it all down to one huge digital file for printing on a 48″-wide printer. PhotoShop was my first thought but it seemed to me that this would be cumbersome. Perhaps it is the right answer, though, keeping each element of the collage in a separate layer and collapsing them all down at the very end?
24 thoughts on “Best software for collaging photos?”
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Nothing comes close to Photoshop for this sort of job. Non-destructive collages are it’s specialty. Place the images on separate layers, use “Layer Masks” to control opacity. Play with the composition modes (the little popup on the layers palette). If you’ve got the right tool, use it.
When I worked at a graphics studio this is what we pretty much did all day. We used Photoshop, and then maybe put that into Illustrator. You can put each image into a layer, then create clipping paths to show only parts of each image. Just be sure you have a lot of memory, our machines would have at least a 1GB.
The other reason to use Photoshop is that it allows you to do what we would call retouching. Your photo image probably contains millions of colors, and a 4 or 6 color printer can only reproduce a small subset of those. You may want to convert the images to CMYK to see how they will appear when printed. I think Alt-C was the shortcut to preview this in Photoshop.
Opps, make that Ctrl-Y on a Windows PC, I forget what it was on the Mac.
Nothing better than PhotoShop on a personal computer. The thing is, since you are working with a 48″ wide output, you need a program that can handle large image file stably. NOTE: you can’t expect fast performance, but for such big image files, those simple and “easy to use” programs probably won’t even work at all. Given this requirement, you will have to look into professional image editor anyway, and IMO PhotoShop is probably the easiest one to learn already.
Nothing better than PhotoShop on a personal computer. The thing is, since you are working with a 48″ wide output, you need a program that can handle large image file stably. NOTE: you can’t expect fast performance, but for such big image files, those simple and “easy to use” programs probably won’t even work at all. Given this requirement, you will have to look into professional image editor anyway, and IMO PhotoShop is probably the easiest one to learn already.
Philip, do , or would an RGB program be sufficient?
Unless you need Photoshop’s CMYK capabilities, I’d suggest looking at some lower-end solutions, such as Macromedia Fireworks. It’s mostly oriented around creating web-resolution graphics, but it can do basic photo manipulation quite well.
It also has the advantage of being cheaper and simpler than Photoshop.
Other credible alternatives:
* The GIMP
* Paint Shop Pro
HTH,
– Michael
I like PanaVue ImageAssembler. You can specify control points manually to improve a stitch.
I’ve been using Adobe Photoshope Elements. Photoshop seems to be far and away the preference of professionals, but I for the simpler stuff I have to say that I’m really very pleased with Elements 2.0. It also uses layers and has many of the same benefits as the full blown Photoshop, but its scaled down so a neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie, such as myself, can use it. But its not like one of those cheap packages that comes with scanners and printers. I recommned Elements 2.0.
<nostalgia>There used to be an app on the Mac (pre-OS X) called Collage that did exactly that. It was very cool, but ultimately they couldn’t differentiate from Photoshop. The main thing it did differently from PS was that it used low-res proxies of the source images while you were manipulating the layers and masks, subbing in the hi-res only when you asked it to “flaten” or compile the layers into an output file. This made it really fast at things that are ordinarily really slow, like compositing a dozen 20MB source images.
The company was Specular International — they made the very cool, very successful (in its day) prosumer-level 3-D app “infini-D”. They got bought by MetaCreations (which divested and sold — the provenance is interesting in a sick sort of way: <http://www.metacreations.com/products/>). I think remnants of infini-D made their way into Carrara. But Collage died before Specular did. RIP.
</nostalgia>
I’ve been using FotoFusion, from some folks in Montreal (www.lumapix.com), which does a great job, and does it with a very easy UI. I’ve done some posters (16×20, 20×30, and 30×40, I think) at http://www.clubphoto.com, with their LightJet printer, and the final product looks fantastic (sharp, brilliant color, etc, on Kodak Digital Print Paper, glossy or matte).
The FotoFusion interface *seems* too simple, but it’s got lots of power if needed. It allows a variety of output formats and very large sizes (even though ClubPhoto has a 6 meg, jpg requirement, which *still* led to the fine prints).
The LumaPix folks are close to a slightly improved version, one which is meant to have “text” abilities (for placing text on the collage) and improving some aspects of extremely-high-res files. They have a forum which discusses these issues, among many more.
Watch your length, printing over ~60 inches in length can require different software and can even be OS dependant. This is not the program you do the art work in, this is the program you will print from. So whatever program you use you will need to make sure whomever is printing the file can open it in a program that can print long pages. I forget the exact specs, google or epson should know them. It goes something like, PDF 40 inches long max, Photoshop 100 Inches max and Illustrator 200 feet max. I have done some photo quality prints on an Epson 10000, the files were huge. The typical print we did was 85 inches and I know we had to use Illustrator to print it and the file size was 1.3gig. If own the printer and are doing this yourself figure depending on the driver the data sent to the printer can be 3x the size of the orginal file so big time ram and virtual memory would be a good thing.
Philip,
Canon cameras ship with a utility known as PhotoStitch, which is pretty good for casual use.
For pros, they use some customized pre-processing software. Here’s a good example http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/
FotoFusion (http://www.lumapix.com) is exactly what you are looking for.
* images can be resized/repositioned/cropped/rotated interactively
* output can be to a single huge image (10,000 pixels across is not unusual)
* printing directly from the application pulls the detail from the original images, not an intermediate image
* lots of automatic tools for building quick layouts, and a fast UI for tweaking
* integrated exposure controls
* collages can also be published as a hotlinked web albums or directly-embedded emails for sharing
–Mike.
I think Photoshop is a really good answer if you already own it. One possible complication is that I believe Photoshop 7 only supports images up to 30,000 x 30,000 pixels. Photoshop CS (or 8 in real numbers) supports up to 300,000 x 300,000. Depending on the resolution you need, you might be forced straight into CS.
We just did a bunch of boxes where I work. I’m not sure of their exact dimensions, but the files were anywhere between 800mb and 1.4gb compressed (in RAM they were *much* bigger). I bumped the artist’s machines from 768mb to 1.25gb midway through the project (using Mac OS X) and it seemed to improve the app’s stability quite a bit.
In any case, as you may be gathering from the comments here, collaging an image this size is not a light undertaking quite yet. Best o’ luck. 🙂
Consider Quark XPress, may be faster for working with that many images if you are not going to be editing them at the same time. It deals with them as previews and the document as postscript (I believe).
Perhaps very simplistic, but montage on Imagemagick creates a simple composition of pictures. From the man page:
montage creates a composite image by combining several
separate images. The images are tiled on the composite
image with the name of the image optionally appearing just
below the individual tile.
The composite image is constructed in the following man
I’m going to agree with everyone else, except for one thing: if you think that automation might be of help, The Gimp might be a better choice than Photoshop. It’s scriptable using a Scheme dialect, and if you know Lisp (and I know you do), the API is easy enough to learn that scripting can be a major timesaver even the first time you script a task. At least it was for me.
I don’t suppose anyone knows of a command-line tool (for Linux/Unix) for making collages? Creating N layers in the GIMP (or Photoshop) and then piecing them all together sounds like a nightmare, especially if one wants to change the size or placement of individual images later… I’d like to be able to specify the collage with a file containing commands along the lines of
place image1.jpg at 200,100 size 250×100
place image2.jpg at 450,100 size 200×100
etc.
For people’s interest, I have posted a couple of medium-size (10,000×7,500-pixel) pixels that were built with FotoFusion using Philip’s pictures of his trip to Mexico.
You’ll find a brief note and links to the images here:
http://www.lumapix.com/media/elements/collages/greenspun/welcome.shtml
The images took literally seconds to create and a few minutes to render. The difference between the top and bottom versions (neatly laid out vs. jumbled) was a single click.
Arcsoft Photoimpressions is a piece of software that I got in a bundle somewhere, and does this very well. It is much faster but also less sophisticated than Photoshop, and doesn’t have as much photo editing capability. But for quickly assembling a collage, it does the trick.
Danny Yee, Jasc Paint Shop Pro v8 (www.jasc.com) now has scripting, so you could probably use it to do what you ask. It does layers, masks and all for collaging.
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Well, Photoshop is a solid app but it is not the be-all-end-all answer to everything. The Gimp is also a very solid app and I expect it will be leaving photoshop in the dust in the next couple of years. I hadn’t used it in a about 2 years but looking over the current features it sounds like I’m going to have to check it out now.
Specular Collage was an awesome app. I remember it also had one other amazing feature that no one ever seemed to notice. It could reduce images to very small sizes and retain an incredible amount of detail. Photoshop could not even begin to compare with the image quality for reductions. In photoshop if I try to make a high-res pic of a fighter jet 20px by 20px, no matter which resampling method I choose, it will become nothing more than a tiny unrecognizable smudge of featureless pixels. In collage the same pic reduced to 20px by 20px would still retain clean detail and be recognizable as a jet. Now I’m about to go pick up an old mac just for the purpose of running my old version of collage because I have never seen any other app that can reduce images so impeccably.