Software Review of:
PhotoMontage 
2000 

Requirements to use this program are very modest: 486-based PC, Win 3.1X through Win NT, 20 MB free HD space, 32 MB RAM, and of course, a color printer to print your masterpiece for all to see. If you are extremely proud of your work, you can have ArcSoft print a poster of it through their PhotoMontage site for a reasonable charge.

The real labor of love is if you decide to use your own photos to create the montage - as I have done for the three covers produced for PC Alamode. PhotoMontage needs lots of photos to choose from to begin montaging. I call it personalization and being creative. My wife calls it being masochistic.

After producing two covers, I knew what had to be done. I started by scanning over 600 old family photos of my own family and ones borrowed from Susan Ives, Tim Hoke, Vade Forrester and Kay Nolan, a family friend. I cropped each photo to a square and then sized it to be 2" X 2" square. I then saved it to a new folder named Sept Cover.

Knowing how the program works, I chose a photo of my granddaughter, Amber Pitts when she was two years old to be the main image on the cover; the image to be created from the montage.

Using Corel Photo-Paint, I scanned the photo of Amber and sized it 8.5 X 11 inches, the size of our cover. I then removed the background behind her head and filled the background with a light shade of grey. Now I would begin modifying the 600 old photos to force them to fit the colors of Amber's photo, i.e. the skin tones, the hair variations, the bow, complete with shadows, in her hair and the grey background.

First, with Amber's photo open, I used the eye dropper tool to sample the color of an area of her face. I minimized Ambers photo and opened the first 2X2 photo. I removed the background in the photo, either with the magic wand and hitting the Delete key or with the Eraser tool. If the photo was pretty dark, I lightened it. I then painted the background previously removed with the skin color that had been sampled a couple of steps earlier. The background of several more old photos were replaced with the same skin tone from Amber's photo.

Another area of Amber's skin tone was sampled with the eye dropper, backgrounds were removed from several more old photos and replaced with the new skin color. And on and on and on. Off and on, this process of adding color to several hundred old photos took several days.

I did a test montage with PhotoMontage with the photos that I had prepared thus far. The montage didn't look good. I needed more modified photos to match the color areas of Amber's picture. I was beginning to hate the September cover.

When the number of 2X2 photos reached 650, I decided to try another montage. It looked good, darn good but there was too much of Amber's dress showing in the montage. I cropped the dress out of Amber's photo, leaving only a white collar and resized the photo to 8.5" by 11 ". One more montage should do it.

The result is what you see on the September cover. Enjoy it because you may be seeing my last cover montage because my wife is threatening to leave me if I should attempt this again.

ArcSoft Photo Montage can be purchased for $39.99.

Arcsoft
46601 Freemont Blvd
Freemont, CA 94538
Phone:800/762-8657