Making a Collage using Photoshop Actions.

My sister completes her two months of married life. To mark this occasion she wanted to give jijaji a collage of photos from when they first met. Se sent me 25 photos in all, to make a good collage out of them. This is what I came up with.

As anyone with a minimal observation faculty would notice, making this or for that matter any collage, has a major repetitive component. Every image needs to be imported into a central file, resized, and pre-processed. In this particular case,  I wanted to give a border to each image and a 3-D effect with the shadows so that the photos pop up. The obvious solution is to use photoshop actions, but why reinvent the wheel. Luckily I found this action (Updated Link: page, software) online which was assembled to generate the same effect BUT it worked only on a single image and moreover divided that image into 25 parts. This is where my abilities got in :). To completely automate the process, the solution I came up with was – using photoshop contact sheet automation process (Automate II). This allowed me to create a single image out of many images. Just set some parameters and voila one has an image with 25 sub-images of equal size. Next the single image was feed to the action and it created a sub layer for each picture, added the borders, and gave it the 3-D popout effect. If one chooses, that could be an end it itself, but having all 25 images of the same size was not what I was interested in. Moreover some images were portrait orientation, that meant little more work. In the final ‘creative’ step of organizing the photos – a step where one could actually spend time on the real part rather than the mundane mechanical one, these photos were then arranges with a meaningful order.