Feature: Olympic How-To shows how to do some fabulous montages
Motivation: One of the best tools for photo compositions and montages is Xara Xtreme

Of course one can do montages in programs like Adobe Photoshop or our current personal favorite editor, Corel PaintShop Pro. But Xara Xtreme (see our recent review here) makes the process so fast, simple and adds a number of unique capabilities that it is hard to pass up when considering doing montages. Xara's claim to fame is its ability to operate on huge bitmap files from 3 to 30MB bytes with lightning speed. In addition, almost all of the operations in Xara are consistent and identical across bitmap, text and vector objects including applying Adobe plugins to vector, text as well as bitmap objects and images. In short, being able to strong photo compositions and montages is one of Xara Xtreme's strengths and at $100, the price is right.

Now to proceed with the exercise you should download a free trial version of Xara Xtreme available here at Xara.com. This will allow you to follow the exercise - also download the zip file of the starting image and other images used in this tutorial. Unzip and place the images in the directory where you do your photo finishing work. Now , without further ado - here is the starting image.

Starting Image

Creating a new Closing Card

Using this as the starting point a series of three changes will be made to make a new Closing Ceremony card. First we delete the top Stadia shot from the montage and in its place add a Rectangle with default black fill stretching nearly the full length across the top. With the Contour tool, we add a border to the rectangle which gives a rounded silver frame look as seen in the screen shot to the left. To this rectangle we add the 3 cards image (3cards.jpg)taken by Pascal LeSegretain of Getty Images. This adds an echo of the background card image. Finally with the Drop Shadow tool it is easy to add a gray shadow to the lower right of the rectangle. All together these operations took less than 5 minutes to do. The longest was positioning the bitmap in the rectangle so that the red "card" appeared at both the left and right ends of the rectangle.

The second change to our Closing Ceremony Card, proved to be quite simple - I spotted a photo by Pascal LeSegretain for Getty Images which just immediately worked. A Carnevale player climbing a ladder with a red umbrella spilling out confetti. So out with Shizuka by simply dragging from the Fill Gallery the red umbrella picture and dropping it onto the star container with Ms. Arakawa. Change the star container using the QuickShape Tool and changing the Number of Sides property from 5 to 4 sided polygon - and in less than a minute you have the screen shot at the left.

The drop shadow and sizing are retained from the old container and worked out nicely for the new card design. The only other change to make was to reverse the direction of the player to looking t the left (inside of the card) rather than to the right. It is a simple change: click on the Fill Tool and when the fill arrows appear, just drag the horizontal arrow from to right to left - and we are done with this step in barely a minute.

The third and final step we shall replace the Stadia image in the middle with another card image. This time the "right" photo is not so obvious. I try several images from the Fill gallery - just dragging and dropping them onto the middle 4-star container. By the way do not worry - each image is replaced by the next, we are not building up a huge stack of overlayed images. Doing so I decide that I do not like the shape of the container - and so using the Mould tool I choose the circular shape from the property bar. Ten just dragging the bottom control point down adds an elliptical look and matches the height of the two adjacent figures.

But I was still not satisfied with the image until I tried the Fill tool again and changed the fill tiling dropdown from repeated tiling to repeated inverted tiling. This had the effect of making the face in the cards, like playing cards, gaze at each other in mirror fashion. A winner.

So now we are done with our three changes, so let us take a look at the finished new Closing Ceremonies Card. But before doing so consider the fact that all these changes with several trial and error steps along the way took all of 20 minutes - and the key to that was the speed and ease of use of Xara Xtreme.

Finished Closing Ceremony Card

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