Here’s a typical scenario: you’re putting together a page and you’ve been given a bunch of people photos you have to organize. They’re a mismatched bunch (see above).
Some of them are posed studio portraits. Some are candid shots. People are posing in every direction, and the photos are all different sizes. What can you do to bring order to this chaos?
Step One: Find the Tightest Crop
To bring order to this photographic chaos, we need to start with the most challenging photo, and bring the others in line with it.
Find the photo with the tightest cropping. In this group, it’s the one in the upper right corner.
Step Two: They Must be Giants
Imagine you are looking through the windows of a house, and you see this:
Eeek! Some of the people in that house are giants! We need to reduce the photos so that they’re the same size. We want the people in the “windows” (the photo frames) to look like they exist in the same reality.
Step Three: Crop Accordingly
Go through the photos and crop them in the same proportions as the photo you’re using as a model. Line up the photo frame so that it hits the heads in the same spot. In this case, it’s tight along the sides of the faces, and cuts off the image a little at the tops of the heads, and just below the chins.
Step Four: Reduce to Fit and Check Alignment
Now take your cropped images and size them so that they match your model photo. Check to see that eyes and chins line up.
Done!
It’s still a mixed bag of photos, but the overall effect is much more unified. Nice work!
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9 thoughts on “Creating Order Out of Photographic Chaos”
Thanks for the tip. Very helpful.
Would it seem too staged and contrived to have the photos of the people looking right into the camera in the middle, and then have those looking to the right, on the left of the middle, and those looking to the left, on the right of the middle shot?
Not at all, Rae. That’s the way I’d do it!
Well, I see you’ve been raiding the designer’s secret vault again 🙂 That is a great tip. Thank you for sharing. It’s sure a lot more fun to arrange digital photos than printed photos (like for a collage).
Thanks for this! I have a client with a series of author pictures that are all over the map, just like your example. Now I know how they can be fixed. Next is to get the client to agree — by forwarding them a note along with a link to this post. Thanks again!
I’m glad you’ve all found this useful. I can’t tell you how many times I am presented with this situation as a designer, so I thought I’d share what to do about it if it happens to you 🙂
This is a really excellent worked example of good design.
The final set of photographs looks superb.
Thank you for sharing this knowledge.
Margaret, see Rae’s comment for how to arrange the resulting photos so they look even better!
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