This tutorial will show you how to create a 'life poster'. A life poster is a collection of dozens of images of your life onto one single poster. What you need: some dozen photos, Posterino and 10 minutes time.
Here's the quick version of the tutorial, for the experienced user this may be all he needs. More detailed instructions see below.
Next we will shed more light on each individual step.
To create a 'life poster':
Start Posterino or create a new document by choosing the
command from the menu.A new document will open and display a sheet of templates:
From the list of templates select the one named "Classic (Portrait)". Depending on your locale the poster size will be 20 by 30 inches or DIN A2.
You should choose a paper size and resolution approbriate for the output target you plan for your poster. If you need a different size, use the paper size.
popup menu or define your ownPress the Choose button.
A new "Classic Life Poster" document will open. You see a poster with many empty image frames to fill:
On the sidebar of the document window you see the image picker:
If the image picker is not visible, press the button at the bottom
of the sidebar or choose from the
menu (or press Command-1).
At the top of the image picker is a popup menu. From this popup menu choose the iPhoto album holding the photos you would like to use for your poster. For example, use the album holding your photos from your last vacation. In our example we choose the "China '04" album holding pictures from our last trip to China. See Importing Images if you want to use other image sources than iPhoto.
Next we will use a very fast way to fill the poster with images:
Choose
from the menu (or press Command-R). This command will fill the poster with random images from the selected iPhoto album.Select the photos you don't like and choose
from the menu (or press Command-Del). This will remove the image from the frame.To select the photos click them with the mouse. You may extend the selection by holding down the Shift or Command key while you click an image.
Repeat the last two steps until you are satisfied with the chosen images.
You may as well use drag and drop to move photos from the image picker into the poster.
Now our poster looks something like this:
Now that we populated our poster with photos, we need to arrange them. There are two possible ways:
You could order all picture by a criteria or place the image at random.
To place your pictures at random, click the
toolbar button (or press Command-Shift-R). Click it again until you are satisfied with the placement.
Fine-tune the random placement using drag and drop to move the images from one place to an other.
If you like to order your picture go to the
menu and choose one of the menu items below . For example, you could arrange your images , or .Next we will inspect our poster to check that no important parts of the images are clipped off by the frame.
Use
(or press Command-'+') and (or press Command-'-') from the menu to zoom in and out of the poster to see more or less details.For example, the image below has a bad clipping because the person's head is clipped off. Look for a similar problem on your poster and double click the image.
The image bounds are displayed and you can grab the orange knobs to change the size of the image, the green knob to rotate the image and the white knob or any other visible part of the image to move it.
In our example we grab the white knob and move the image down a bit.
Now it looks much better :-)
If you are satisfied with your poster, choose the toolbar button (or press Command-K) to show the export options:
You have several ways to process your poster:
The rendering may take some time...
The whole poster will look better if you don't place images with similar colors next to each other. And try to pick photos with lots of different colors.
The same is true for the overall nature and contents of the image. For example, don't place aunt Martha next to aunt Martha, put some images of dog Scuby in-between.