Creating An Urban Montage

I was reading one of my photography magazine and came across an article about creating an urban montage. The technique was easy and so I gave it a try. To my surprise, I really like the outcome as it look like an art piece.

Picture taken at Universal Studio Singapore. Click on it to see the higher resolution full size picture.

Steps to Create the Montage

1. Choose a picture - I had gone through and tried on various types of photographs, and find that the montage looks great with vibrant pictures of landscape or cityscape that have quite a fair bit of details. (That's my opinion - feel free to try out whatever seems good to you :)

2. Use Photoshop to duplicate 12 additional copies (layers) of the picture, with each layer rotated incrementally at 30-degrees. In other words, you will have 6 of layers rotated at 30, 60, 90, 120, 150 and 180 in clockwise direction, and the other 6 layers rotated in similar angles in anti-clockwise direction.
(Note: Any angle of rotation can be use, and it doesn't need to have 12 additional copies. In my case, I followed the magazine because 12 copies of 30-degree rotation each will complete a 360-degree rotation.)

3. Set the blending mode for each of the 12 layers to "Soft Light". Lower the opacity of each layer if the montage looks a little too overwhelming after the blending.

4. Shift and move each layer around to create the montage. There is no science to this - it is all dependent on you playing around and shifting each layers to give the desired montage "look" of your picture.


That's all! Simple technique that can create really beautiful artistic looking pictures. Try it out :)