Arty Crafty

Was having a play around at the weekend with Microsoft’s montage program which I had forgotten about since buying the new laptop. James’s mum Annie reminded me about it when she brought along to the club, some photos of her and her sisters that she had run through the program over the weekend. I first came across it when James used it to make a montage of photos of him and Julia for a song CD case that he was preparing for Julia. He used the trial version which leaves a watermark over the final image but for the princely sum of £18 you can buy the full version which is what I ended up doing. It’s a bit tricky to get used to in that you don’t have a lot of control over the final montage apart from ranking the top two images, selecting the level of overlap and the number of images used, the program decides what goes where based on its or your ranking. However it produces pretty neat results and if you try out face detection (there is a manual option too where you can draw a box around a face or faces) it will then try not to overlap faces or important details. I know that as an avid user of Photoshop it shouldn’t be too hard to create my own montages but as with all things, it’s easier said than done and this little program does it a lot quicker. You can save which ever creations it makes or just keep selecting “Create” again to get another combination.

I also got carried away making some arty pictures out of a few photos I took of some ice patterns that were on Julia's car the other morning. The car had a leaf-like pattern of ice crystals all over the black roof which looked quite interesting so I grabbed my trusty Panasonic and took a few snaps before the sun started to melt it. Of course the final images bear no resemblance to the original shots as is usually the case when I get carried away in Photoshop but I think they look good nevertheless.