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Creating Photo Montages in PowerPoint
by Rachel Myerson
(Sep 21, 2007)
As someone who works in a corporate environment, I spend a large part of my day in front of a computer. When I get home, I enjoy the hands-on experience of paper scrapping. For this reason, I doubt that I would ever become a fully digital scrapper. However, even I can sometimes find a compelling reason to use digital techniques combined with paper to create layouts. One example of this is to combine large numbers of photographs into a montage that I can then cut out and make into a paper layout such as this one:
The computer software that I am most comfortable with is Microsoft PowerPoint, so I chose to make this photo montage in PowerPoint. PowerPoint is easy to use and is already on many computers as it is part of the Microsoft Office Suite. If you don’t have expensive photo editing software, PowerPoint is a good alternative for combining photos. Here are the simple steps I used to create each half of the above layout. Open PowerPoint and start a new document. It is important to use a blank template. If you can’t find a blank template, you can edit an existing template. Hold down the shift key and move the mouse over buttons in the lower left corner until you find one for “Slide Master View”. Click that and you will be able to edit the slide master using it like a template<. Delete everything on the screen and then click the same button (without shift) to get back to “normal view”. I like to use a shape as a guideline for my montage. In this case I used an oval. I clicked on the oval button on the bottom of my screen and drew an oval of the appropriate size. I then highlighted the oval and clicked on the dashed line button to make the oval dashed.
The next step is to add photos one at a time. To add a photo, chose the following drop-down menus: “Insert”, “Picture”, “From File” and “Locate the Picture”.
Continue to add photos the same way until they are all on the screen. Use the mouse to move the photos around until you like the way they are arranged. One attribute of PowerPoint is that elements are layered in front of and behind each other according to when they were added. It is possible to change these layers by moving an element forward, all the way to the front, backward, or all the way to the back. This is done by clicking on the element you want to move and then clicking the “Draw” button, choosing “Order”, and choosing the desired option.
Once the photos are all arranged, any guideline (such as my oval) should be sent to the back or deleted before the montage is printed onto photo paper.
After printing, cut out the montage, adhere to cardstock or patterned paper and embellish. It is also possible to create a round or oval montage. In this case fill the shape entirely and bring the guideline to the front. Make sure that all the faces are inside the guideline. After you print the montage, cut along the guideline. Even if you don’t work in the corporate environment and have never used PowerPoint, next time you have a lot of photos to use on a single layout consider using PowerPoint to make them into a fun photo montage.
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