Sorry I’ve been a while, I’m trying to do too many things at the same time. Anyhow here is the next phase in your montage.
Preparing the background.
There may be more work to do yet on the individual pic’s, but they can wait for a while. If we make a background at least we can gain some encouragement in seeing something of where we are going.
Now the background can be a work of art or simply a single picture where we wish to place our smaller ones – shown is one I have just made up, this is itself a montage of the Isle of Rhum - Scotland, Cottesloe -W.A. and a text layer.
The main thing when creating your background is resolution. You must make a decision now as to how big will be the biggest print you make for it or if for a webpage what size do you wish it to appear on the screen. Multiply maximum printing size in inches by 300, so if your final print is going to be 36” x24” your background has to be a huge 10,800pixels by 7,200pixels or 222megabytes for a single layer. I know few people will work on this size but that example is just a warning of how big these files can get –and it’s still only the background. If you are doing a montage for the net then you have a much easier time ahead. Decide on your size (usually but not necessarily screen size) and multiply by 72 to get your final canvas size.
Irrespective of how you do your background make sure that it is finished and then if it is layered save a copy of the layered file as a backup if needed later, then flatten your working copy and save it as such. If I am working on a big file I usually also reduce the resolution to my screen size and save that one as well. So I now have three background images, 1-fullsize and fully layered (hopefully I won’t need this one again but it is here in case of either a stuff up or a change of plan: 2-a full sized and flattened image (my actual background): and 3, a screen sized copy (this is to experiment with different layouts)
Next we shall go back to our individual pic's
Denn
