The Mike Matas Blog: How to make a Life Poster
Cool stuff! If I could gather 98 of my favorite photos, and figure out how to work it with Gimp or something, I’d totally want to make one. Or, hopefully someone with a Mac could do it for me.
How to make a Life Poster
Published by
Well after a bit of searching, I’ve found an extension called Tiny-Fu that is intended to replace Script-Fu…(no, I don’t entirely know what I just said there.) Anyway, it is supposed to include a script for creating contact sheets. I installed Tiny-Fu, but for some reason the contact sheet script is not showing up where it should for me. I emailed the script’s author to ask for suggestions, so hopefully I’ll have a fix soon. From there on out, I think it should be fairly easy to adapt the instuctions to work with GIMP.
LikeLike
More reading, more tinkering…found how to run the script. Problem is, now when it’s finished, I get some kind of file load error, and I still end up with nothing. I’m starting to think it’s time to download a trial version of Photoshop CS and just do it that way. {frown}
LikeLike
Thanks for giving it a shot, Cards. I’ll probably just post a comment in that article, and hopefully someone can help further. If I find something, I’ll update here. 🙂
LikeLike
Well, I sorta refuse to give up, so I’ve been thinking more about this project. I have an idea, but it could be very time consuming…would be much more feasible if I knew how to create a sort of macro for GIMP. The idea is to take each individual image and shrink it a few pixels smaller than the 4×3, then fill the outer border with white (or whatever color you’d like). This would be used to create the small gridlines in between each photo. Then, you just create the blank 20×30 image, turn on the grid, and turn on “snap to grid”. Then just go into the grid setup and set the gridlines to be 4×3. After that, you just use “open as new layer” for each photo, and place each wherever you’d like. Because we checked “snap to grid”, they’ll automatically pop into place perfectly, so no worries about manually lining them up perfectly, and since we created white borders on each photo, we now have a perfect grid of photos. Like I said before, the only flaw I see is that manually resizing each photo and adding the border to each would be pretty time consuming. This method also doesn’t take any photo retouching or color optimizations into consideration…so that could be another thing to take up some time. Still…it would work, and the end result should be pretty good assuming the photos you started with are decent quality in the first place.
LikeLike