creating a photo strip

[jennriegel]

Hey all

Just wondering if anyone can give some instructions on how to create a strip of photos, like a series of 3-5, that are saved as one image, and it looks like a series of pictures matted in a frame, but without the frame... How are all the pictures lined up together and saved as one final file? How are the borders/"mat" created? Hope this makes sense. Thanks for any input! Also, I'm using Elements 4...

[SandeeWig]

Hi there! private posted a tutorial not too long ago. I did a quick search and found it. There might be others, I'm not sure, but this one is good. I think she uses Elements also.

Here's the tutorial.

Good luck!

[AnneWynne]

http://coffeeteaphotography.blogspot...templates.html
This site has a lot of ready made mat templates (and a lot of other stuff), all for free.

Anne

[jennriegel]

Thank you! Those are both great links. I did figure some things out for myself, a very simple way to do it, not sure if that's what I was supposed to do...

The first link is pretty much what I was looking for, although I couldn't sort through all the steps in my head on the fly, so I'll have to work through it step by step and see what I come up with. The second link has some great templates, I'd love to learn to make those myself.

Here's what I ended up doing:

I went to File > New > Photomerge Panorama. I had opened Elements 4 by dragging three pictures to the icon, so when the Photomerge box popped up, it already had those file names available to select. I selected them, hit "ok", and it opened up a window where I could drag the photos into the window and put them where I wanted them. I did have some trouble with them, if they are not exactly the same size, like one of them I had cropped and not resized, so I had to pick a different picture. Once I had three that I wanted that were the same size, I lined them up exactly like I wanted them, with a little space in between each, and hit "ok". It created one new file of the three pictures lined up.

Played around with some adjustment layers. Then eventually when to Create Adjustment Layer > Solid Color... and picked white.

I then reduced the opacity to about 25% so I could still see the layer but could see the pictures as well, and used the square marquee selector to select each photo. I cut into each photo a very little bit on the tops and bottoms as well as the sides, to create the mat/frame. Then I hit delete and those sections were deleted off. I upped the opacity back to 100% and there was my mat. Saved it, etc.

Now, my friend tried this with Elements 6 and we couldn't get it to work. The first difference in her process was that once she had done the Photomerge and had the new file, she zoomed out to see the full image and the background. She selected the crop tool and selected the image. Then she dragged the crop lines out past the image on all sides, to create the border (whereas I just "cut in" to my photos by not selecting the entire image with the marquee selector), hit crop and had a new image with the background as the border.

When she tried to add the solid color layer, after reducing the opacity and making her selections to be deleted, when she hit delete, it was like most of it had been deleted but there was still a "residue" of the layer of solid color. When she boosted the opacity again, the border/mat/frame was there, but there was a "film" of the solid color layer over her photos. We tried several different things and couldn't get it to do it differently, or work any other way. Any speculations?

Thanks, again, for the links! I tried to upload my final image to show you, but it said a security token was missing...?? I have no idea what that means!

[andieecarter]

Although the photo gifts to give you a great opportunity to create any number of different album strip, the use of one or more of your favorite photos, it can often prove difficult to narrow your choices to a single screen.

[charlemackk]

Although the photo gifts to give you a great opportunity to create any number of different albums areas, the use of one or more of your favorite photos, it can often prove difficult to narrow your choice to a screen.

[BigFuzzy]

Lightroom has some great templates in the "Print" module (I think) that make it very very easy.

I did the below image in about 2 minutes including selecting images, positioning them and saving the final product: