Creating a montage involves combining photos into one composition. The basic things that we usually need to consider for a montage would be: a unifying theme, images that match the selected theme, and a well designed layout.

The Smart lasso tool makes selecting and extracting objects to be used in a montage quick and easy. This tool automatically snaps to the edges of the desired object as you guide your mouse around it, allowing you to make fast and accurate selections. In this tutorial, you will learn how to seamlessly blend different images to create a background and how to use the Smart lasso to select and extract more objects for the montage. The pictures below will be used which you can find in the samples folder of the PhotoImpact installation CD. We will be using the labels below to refer to each source image.

Landmarks Folder:                 Objects Folder:
 
     A (arche033.jpg)             B (0647077l.jpg)

People Folder:
   
        C (0211007l.jpg)                    D (1346044l.jpg)                    E (1366061l.jpg) 


       F (peopl067.jpg)


The final montage will be a postcard-like image as shown below:

Step One: Prepare the Montage Background

Begin by creating the background of the montage. First, open image A. We will then expand the canvas to place the other background images. Select Adjust: Expand Canvas to open the Expand Canvas dialog box. Make sure that Expand sides equally is unchecked, then add 300 pixels to the right side of the canvas (half of the size of the base image).

Click Object: Insert Image Object - From File then open image B. Drag it to the right until it covers half of image A and all of the white space on the right.

Repeat the above process, this time opening image C. Resize and position it as illustrated in the example below.