Lately I had been racking my brain trying to work out how to place multiple images together in a vertical collage with one image on the bottom of the next, I have seen this done on other blogs and the Wow !! factor is well worth the effort, after much trial and error I failed to achieve the overall effect that I wanted. I consider myself reasonably well self taught at photoshop, this time I found that not only did I need the experiance to construct this with photoshop, I also needed to be able to understand how wordpress operates as well. I have only been a member with wordpress for about a month and a half and am still discovering things, after my first effort Example 1, I contacted the forums on wordpress where I was contacted almost immediately by many of the members as well as some of the wordpress team they gave me many options including some I may use in the future all at this link http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/placing-multiple-stacked-images-into-a-blog?replies=30#post-706983
One of the forum members panaghiotisadam advised me to not caption my photographs and when you opened the photograph in wordpress in the advance section type 0 or None in the border field.
This was a great tip and helped me immensely.
I also contacted Corwin Hiebert at http://www.corwin@pixelatedimage.com
Who is a wonderful photographer and works closely with another photographer whom I also read his blog regularly. David Duchemin http://www.pixelatedimage.com/blog
Davids blog and images are fantastic and this is where I first saw this concept of multiple images. Anyway Corwin was able to put me in touch with Dave Serram http://www.photographybb.com/forum/index.php He was able to give me the ability to try in photoshop the below formula. Which I was able to make this effort. in which I was most impressed with.
Here’s what I do:
1) I create a blank Photoshop document. I choose a document size based on the full width of my blog (585px or smaller) and the height can be however tall you would like the final full image of all the stacked pages to be. I believe in this case the image is 500px x 328px.
2) Next, I drag all of the individual images into Photoshop, and place them on their own layer.
3) Control-T (PC) or Command-T (Mac) to resize the images (lock the proportion!) and rotate them slightly
4) Next I add a layer style to any one of the images.
(a) I include a Drop shadow at an opacity of 25%
(b) I include an Outer Glow, but change the blend mode to Multiply, and change the color to black (I believe the default is a light-yellow), and reduce the opacity to 35%
5) One you have done the layer style on one layer, you can copy it to other layers by holding down the Alt key (PC) or Option key (Mac) and clicking on the layer style in the layers palette (it shows up just under the layer it has been applied to), and dragging it onto another layer. Repeat for each layer.
6) Then it’s just a matter of rearranging the layers in the order that you would like. Save for web… and you’re done!
Thanks Dave this seems to work I just need to tweak the drop shadow and the outerglow.
To everyone that helped me, giving freely they’re working knowledge in photoshop, wordpress and also with all the other suggestions concerning this topic I just wish to say.
Kudos to you all
As always you make me believe that no matter what, there are always people willing to help, you only have to ask. I am finding in this heady world of photography and it is a little crazy at times. That this has been a very refreshing view for myself concerning photography and all the people involved.
CruiseNomad 