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Hi,

I have decided i want to get a little more into the photography side of the miniature painting hobby. Mainly to present them better on sites like this. I have been using iPhoto for my general image editing and adjustment where needed.

I am wondering how I would go about making those nice colleges people make, where you have multiple angles of the model shown on one big collage. Is there any free or cheap soft are that can do this?

thanks for your help.

Give Gimp a shot (gimp.org). It's a freeware version of Photoshop; not quite as user friendly, but it works fine and doesn't involve dropping several hundred dollars.

Picasa is free and I am pretty sure it let's you do collages.

There is a PC shareware called Autostitch.

http://autostitch.en.softonic.com/

I use Photoscape

http://photoscape.org/ps/main/download.php

+1 for The GIMP. afterall its' name means general image manipulation program, how cool is that.

i use GIMP for pretty much everything, it has tons of downloadable extras as well for specific tasks that don't come standard.

The way i would do it would be to take 4/5 shots of the figure in differant rotations then open all 4/5 in gimp figure out their total width (or length however you feel like stackign them) then create a new image with the dimentions you need and copy all your images into your new extra wide/long image. fit them nicelly, run a few filters do some color adjusting maybe a blur here or there or add in a crop with a close up if you have too much negative space (empty parts of the image) and you will have a cool collage looking photo ready for us to admire.

here are some of my fav examples...well i just like the figure and the way they painted it lol but the photos are rather good too. check em out.

http://www.coolminiornot.com/234756?browseid=734524

http://www.coolminiornot.com/190642?browseid=734524

Haven't used Photoshop since CS (and that, only infrequently), so I can't make a direct comparison, but generally GIMP is only as complicated as you make it. Five minutes of browsing the vast library of tutorials is all you need to learn how to crop, combine, resize, etc. if you're a total photo-editing neophyte, as long as you're reasonably computer-literate. There's even an automatic white balance adjuster, if you want more beef than the Dakka gallery's offering (as lovely a feature as it is, for those who don't bother with any pre-upload processing) without any added complexity.

If you want to do fancy stuff later on, there's a rather skilled and active community that has churned out tons of add-ons, custom brush sets, and the like, as well as decent tutorials on how to use all of them. And that doesn't even touch on the loads of features the program comes with, stock.

I'm sure there are more "user friendly" programs and web-based services out there, but if it's easy enough to learn to use a more powerful tool, why not lay the groundwork in case you decide to take things further somewhere down the road?

illuknisaa wrote:I use Photoscape

http://photoscape.org/ps/main/download.php

This... It's free, has a number of editing options and a ton of different collage layouts you can use very easily.

Hi,

thanks for all the advice. I am just downloading GIMP now. the other recommendations don't seem to have mac versions, so GIMP seems to be the only option.

Cheers again, hopefully I will have some nicely presented photos to share soon

I've used The GIMP extensively before (it's an Open Source app, not freeware. It is free but, ah never mind, just my inner FLOSS geek pedant side!). It's pretty good once you get the hang of it.

Keyboard shortcuts. Learn 'em. They will make your life much, much, much easier. Did I mention how much easier they'd make life? MUCHLY!

Further advice is difficult to give without a baseline of what you already understand about image editing. I don't know what iPhoto is like.

Good luck!

Theres an open source image editor for mac called Seashore that always used to get good reviews. I find GIMP bloody awful to use. Could also check the app store and see whats on there.

Photoshop elements is an excellent program and very reasonably priced as well

Cool thanks for the additional recommendations. I will look into them also.


Cheers