This is the latest software introduction to create a photomontage of hundreds and hundreds of small thumbnail images to produce a jaw-dropping reaction from your friends, all with the same question: “How in the world did you do that?”

MontagePlus comes with its own supply of thumbnails to produce a montage using a “master” image you select or you can create your own thumbnail collection via two methods:

1) You can scan your own photos to create the hundreds of thumbnails used to produce a montage. This ends up being a masochistic exercise to create a sufficient number of thumbnails to produce a good montage to match all the color tones in your master image. Even so, imagine that some close friends are getting ready to celebrate their 50th anniversary. Then imagine producing a montage of the couple using old photos of them and their children through the years. This would make a wonderful anniversary present for your friends.

2) You can create a new collection using a digital movie file (.MPG or .AVI) to extract images. As you can imagine, this technique is a great time-saver to create a collection. Imagine you have digital movies of a wedding. Now you can create a one-of-a-kind montage of the bride or bride and groom from images extracted from the wedding video

Once you’ve created a montage to your satisfaction, you can print the montage as an 8.5"X11" print or you can adjust print output size to print a poster of your creative juices. How can you do that with a desktop color printer you ask? MontagePlus supports tiled output, which lets you print multiple sheets, then trim and assemble them into a poster-sized masterpiece (a dialog box tells you how many pages you will need).

MontagePlus comes with a very slim 12-page instruction manual included in the package but the program was so easy to use, nothing more was needed. So walk through a photomontage with me using an image of our daughter.

Figure 1 shows the opened image of our daughter in the window on the left. A popup window opens to select the collection you intend to use to produce the montage and the size of the thumbnails that will be used to create the montage.

The next step is to click on the Create button and Figure 2 illustrates the montage being build with small thumbnails marching across the screen from left to right, one line at a time. This part of the process is fascinating to watch.

Figure 3 shows a section of her face to illustrate how the fingernail images (I used the default images provided by the MontagePlus program) build the montage.

MontagePlus requires a PC with Win95, 98, Me, 2000, NT or XP; 32MB RAM; 95MB free HD space. Additional disk resources and memory are required when creating, printing or saving poster-sized images.

You can buy Serif MontagePlus 1.0 online for $39.99 at the Serif home page.