Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Hi Folks,
I want to create a montage.
Some pics ended up on page 2.
Short of deleting from page 2 and dragging the same pics onto page 1 is there a simple "drag and drop" from page 2 to page 1?
Thanks for the help.
LONG time user of Studio
Paul

Paul,
Assuming you want to put a number of images on one page and perhaps position and rotate some a few degrees for effect, just add your first image setting the size to your desired choice.   (Let's say that you are using an A3 paper size) you can easily get 7 or 8 3 x 4s, or vary the sizes)
Now click the little red "F" top right of the preview panel. It will ask you if you want Freehand Mode.
Say OK.
Now you can use your mouse to drag them around on the preview panel.
You can go to the Full Page Editor and move them using the arrow keys to precise locations.

If you want to tilt or cant any, put that image into the batch screen and rotate -15 or +15 degrees and SAVE the filter. You can also use FILE SAVE AS instead to make that tilted image separate and keep the one untilted.
I attached a sample of tilted. Looks great on a white background.
I hope I am guessing right on exactly what you want to do.

Fred

PS You can even overlap images!

Just to add to Fred's comments. As he said, the key to this is to use Freehand Placement mode, drag the images to the preview and than sort out the details of the arrangement  in the Full Page Editor by moving around on the page and using Bring to Front/Send to back feature on the right click menu.
See attached below for some montages I did last year - the Job Log is wonderful to find stuff :)
Is this the sort of thing you want to do?
Terry

Hi Guys, That is more or less the end product I want to have. I have done something similar. Not as goodlooking as yours though.
The problem occurs when I hit the wrong button like:
Actions>queueActions>BatchProcess>sortprints. THEN some prints end up on a new second page. DAMN!
Would be really nice if I could have 2 pages on full page editor. Then i could drag the naughty pictures back to where they should be, on the first page. I can then overlap. rotate and generally get my wife to say "don't like that" or words to that effect.
I'm sure you know what i mean.
Any way around it, besides not hitting the wrong button?

Thanks for kind help

Paul

Definitely the wrong button; that's ok if not using Freehand mode.  :o

Yes, other than removing the misplaced image from the queue and reloading to the queue in freehand mode.
Make sure both pages are set to freehand - with that little red F on the main screen or in the Full Page editor.
In the FPE go to the second page with that has the mis-placed image, select it, right click and choose "cut to clipboard".
Go back to page 1, select an image, right click and choose either "Paste Before" or "Paste After" - done!

If you want to make collage's automatically there's a cheap ($10) Microsoft program called AutoCollage. Fred and I reported on this some time ago, see:
http://ddisoftware.com/tech/computer-software/collage-some-interesting-results/ There's a link to it there.
You can use it in trial mode but it's cheap enough to buy and fun to watch it working. It's quite clever the way it blends the images and you can influence the final result to some extent.
There are some other examples here. http://www.pbase.com/tjm04/collage
Health warning, you may be up all night playing with it  ;D

Terry

Thanks. It worked!!!!
Bright, intelligent, goodlooking AND a sense of humour.

No man could ask for more.

Thanks again.


Suggestion for Mike, if you don't mind:

When resizing the paper to be used for a layout, perhaps the software could ask "keep existing layout?".

If yes then QI resizes all pics relatively and the hard work of the layout can be re-used.

Sounded like a good idea at the time?

have a great day.
luverly here in aussie

Thanks much for posting that solution, Terry.  I've had the same problem.

AutoCollage is indeed a fun program.  Almost addictive to watch as it re-shuffles the images.

Try making a collage from multiple copies of the same image...something like a close-up of a flower, for example.  Give priority to one image (thus making it larger) and shuffle until it comes out in the middle, with the smaller images arrayed around it.  Interesting effect.

The key (or more modestly a key) to moving images to other pages is to make sure there is room on the incoming page. If in doubt then reduce one of the images that are already there to a much smaller dimension - and then bring it back to your intended size when the new shot has landed.

If not you'll find Q starts shuffling images that you have already positioned - and undoing lots of your hard work.

Tony