Wolf Pack Inc

The art of creating a photo montage was popularised by the pop art culture in the 1960s when advertisers and street designers brought photo montage to a street level. Perhaps the emblem of photo montage then was the Beatles record cover for their studio album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The album cover featured famous celebrities printed in life size model cardboards and were layered to stand together. Celebrities decked in colourful wear fronted the record cover and it proved to be a good representation of the record’s psychedelic direction.

If you are thinking of duplicating such a design, there are several techniques you need to master.

• Retouching

Retouching the photograph would be to edit and touch up any uneven or missing areas on a photograph. Therefore, crop out excess background and noise to achieve a better focus. Also, zoom in on the photographs to make sure that the colours on it are even and there are no gaps. This step requires you to be very meticulous and careful because it involves the whole picture of your montage.

• Masking

If you want to focus an area of the photo and detach it from the rest of the image, this is where the technique of masking comes in. Say if you only want a figure from this picture and you want to combine it with another image, the technique of masking comes in. First you have to separate the image from the rest of the background. Make clean, sharp cuts around the edges so that the photo will sit nicely on your other image after that.

• Fading

Blur the image when you combine the 2 selected ones together. By blurring the sides, you will gently blend the 2 images together so that the combination will look natural. After putting the 2 images together, fade the sides of the image to create a gradual transition between the 2 images.