Montage: Early Stages and Planning

I think the first thing I knew I had to consider was what resolution I was going to scan at. I had a quick read of the booklet given to us by David Gee (tutor and Photoshop extraordinaire), but decided that- since I had already made a pretty good job of some collages last year (see previous post)- I didn't really need to know all that was detailed. I really just wanted to get on with the scanning and messing around (experimenting in Photoshop). I think a project like this is more about having fun than understanding the technical side. That being said, the first thing I did was to scan an old photo of my parents twice (one at 300dpi and one at 600dpi) to give me an idea of the the pros and cons of each one. I did this because the 300dpi didn't look too clever on screen when I first opened it. However, the 600dpi one looked even worse, possibly because (using Dave's notes) "the image resolution [was] set at a value near or above the printer's [HP Photosmart C470] resolution". Below is an image of my mother and father "back in the day" scanned at different resolutions.

Scanned at 300dpi

scanned at 75dpi (for some reason my scanner doesn't have a 72). Note how faded it looks compared with the one scanned at 300dpi.

It is also important to know whether an image will work best scanned as colour, greyscale or black and white. Before looking into this, I foolishly thought B&W would be similar to greyscale, but apparently not. Black and White does exactly what it says on the tin, whereas greyscale contains all the tones in between the two: "all artwork falls into two basic categories -- black-and-white line art and continuous-tone images"  (1). Grayscale falls into the second bracket. Below is an image (again of my mother and father in their halcyon days) scanned using greyscale, black and white and colour.

Colour pays heed to the subtleties of the image, representing the true feel of the photograph. Any changes can then be made in Photoshop. I plan n scanning everything as a colour image.

Greyscale looks faded by comparison.

Black and White just renders the photo unworkable. It is akin to the Hard Mix blend mode of layers in Photoshop (below).

Hard Mix blend of the greyscale image

Hard Mix blend of the colour version.

The next step was to follow the tutorial on "touching-up" that was presented to us by Dave at a later date. This is basically the kind of stuff you see advertised in the shop windows of photographers and printers ["we restore old photographs here" etc.]. I don't think I will retouch all the photos I use in my piece (I want some to retain their authenticity of the time), but below is a retouching of the first image I showed. I've also added a Levels layer, darkening both the blacks and midtones for extra "punch".

Note how I have completely removed the wear to the right of the image. And looks so much better once I played with the levels.

Additional to these photos from yesteryear, I knew from my collage/montage last year that text works really well because key words from the text can be associated with certain images. It was just as well- whilst rummaging through my family's old archives- I also stumbled across an old hymn sheet and other typed sheets. Here I plan to enlarge the text in Photoshop by cropping, and layering over an image. This will then allow me to alter the opacity, fill and blend modes. As you can imagine, most of these documents are stained and/or have been written on by either myself as a child or another child in our family at the time. This makes them perfect for use as textures, much like the session dedicated to transforming portraits into composite images.

The printed word works very well in the montage, as certain words can be linked to relevant images.

The idea of the printed word used to strengthen the images used in a my montage gave me another idea: I could scan my passport (now expired) to create the theme of identity, which links inextricably with family. I already have countless amounts of pictures of me at various stages of my life, so I could use these (memories) to link with the more impersonal document of the passport, with its expressionless smile. The burgundy cover of the passport itself could also be used as a texture, or else merged with the main part.

Montage for me is not just about images, but also typeface: there's no mistaking the strict, regimental font of the passport, made more so when juxtaposed with memories from the past.
The text looks faded here, but with a Levels layer, this can soon be made more bold and workable.

Old, worn, tatty, the outside jacket of the passport might make a good texture, or at least blended something at some point.

Just as I considered the ways text can be linked to images, I think I also need to consider the colours I use when constructing a piece of work such as this. To say Photoshop has a lot of potential would be understatement of the year, and it is very much the more sophisticated relative of an artist's palette. An artist wouldn't combine colours that didn't go together whilst painting a masterpiece, and it is no different when using a digital program such as Photoshop. I have been looking at the types of colours involved in some of the old photos I have, so now I need to find ways of keeping things within the same colour gamut. I have a found a good way of doing this is to create a Curves adjustment layer with a Clipping Mask attached, so that I can then adjust the Red, Green and Blue curves separately. The clipping mask only effects the layer below, which in this case would be a new image layered over the original/main image.

I think at this stage I pretty much have a footing on what I aim to do. From here-on in, it will pretty much be a case of "suck it and see". I will be trying things and posting the various stages on here just to keep a breast of things, whether they work or not (and why).

1) http://www.creativepro.com/article/scanning-101-setting-the-right-resolution