With large format printers becoming much more popular and affordable I have started taking a shine to doing 13x19-inch posters that contain a series of images from a single trip. For example in August 2006 I went to the San Francisco Zoo for the day and I shot over 1000 images. When I got home I decided I wanted to do a poster of the best images. In the end I used 66 of my most favorite images to do the poster. At the time I used Adobe Photoshop CS2’s contact sheet automate plug-in and I had it leave the contact sheets layered. I did this with first 33 of the images and then a second contact sheet of the remaining 33 images. I then spent several hours combining the two in to one 13x19-inch document. I added the Zoo sign and some text and I was ready to print (you can view the finished poster in the Image Gallery below.) Having very much enjoyed doing this as well as falling in love with the final printed poster I wanted to do this with more of my photos.
The problem was however, the process took a very long time. Besides the time needed to color correct each of the 66 images and saving them out in a separate directory (making them easier to find and use) there was the process of combining the two contact sheets. Another problem was that all of the images had to be either portrait or landscape otherwise I would have had gaps in the poster so I had to “creatively” crop some images so that all 66 images were landscape (I had more landscape than portrait images so it made sense to go landscape, if I had had more portrait I would have went that route). In the end with the image processing, contact sheet combining and other design and layout processes I spent nearly 12 hours doing this. Don’t get me wrong it was fun and the end result is fantastic. I think this is a great way to use a lot of images from a single trip and have it come out as something really special, I can see something like this as a gift for a new bride and groom, simply frame it wrap it and there you go. But, I also had to be realistic. If each one took this amount of time I wouldn’t be doing too many posters. I just have too much other work to do to do this very often.
So I started looking for a program that could make the entire process easier. Since I have looked at and tested just about every automatic image correction program or plug-in available I knew that in the end I would still have to manually color and exposure correct each image I wanted to use in the poster. But, I wanted something that would make the layout of the poster both faster and easier. I even dared hope that I could find a program that could either do it all automatically (and still do a nice creative job of it) as well as making it easy to do it manually when I wanted something special. To be honest after looking for several days I didn’t think I would find anything. The programs that did it automatically not only didn’t do a nice job they had very poor manual layout tools. The programs that had great manual layout tools didn’t do much on the automatic front. I was beginning to think it was going to be me, Photoshop and 12 hours. Then I came across LumaPix FotoFusion Studio (there are two lesser versions available at lower prices).
Now when I downloaded the trial version I wasn’t holding my breath. However, I was not only presented with a very clean, attractive and innovative interface I was presented with wonderful automatic tools that created very nice looking results as well as a plethora of manual tools that not only let me design my own posters from scratch but made it very easy and fast to do. When it came to output I could print my poster, I could export it to an image file like JPG, TIF, etc. I could e-mail it, I could put it on the web or if I wanted to do a poster larger than 13x19 I could upload it to one of the supported professional labs to have it professionally printed and then mailed to me. Finally, it could also catalog and manage my photos, I couldn’t believe my luck not only had a found a program that had incredible automatic collage creation features it had incredible manual tools with some really nice automatic assist features, incredible output options and image management too.
The one feature I really fell in love with was the auto collage feature. You just select your images, choose some options like paper size and resolution and then FotoFusion in less than 5 minutes has a new collage for you. But, the one thing that was nifty beyond believe was each time you click on one of the auto collage styles (normal, jumbled, sparse) it recreates the collage by shuffling the images around and changing their sizes so instead of creating an auto collage and then manually tweaking it (which you can do if you want) you can just keep generating random ones until you find something you like. The down side to this is that it seems the collages all have the same kind of look and feel to them instead of each one being very different. Now this becomes a very large problem when you are attempting to use lots of images in a collage. If you stay to 20 or so images the randomness actually creates a nice variety of different layouts. However, if you do a 13x19-inch poster with 120 images the random layout is limited to basically shifts in the positions of the larger images vs the smaller ones as well as the location of the images (they move around on the page.) I can understand why this would happen. However, I would like to see options for randomly coloring the borders, shadows and things like this so that besides the auto collaging of the image with different sizes and positions you could do different colored borders, shadows and the like. I would want to be able to turn these options on and off, but I think it would be fun.
Because FotoFusion has such an innovative interface I not only found it easy to learn and use, but very intuitive. For example if you want to resize, crop or rotate an image it is simply a matter of clicking on the image and then choosing the on image editing point that corresponds to what you want to do (pan, crop, resize, rotate, etc.) If you want to edit or add a drop shadow, frame and mattes, photo adjustments like saturation, opacity, etc. simply click on the image and an editing box pops up on screen right next to the image then you simply choose the part of the image you want to change (picture, frame, shadow, etc.) and more options come up for that. All very intuitive and nice looking. And, like you would expect you get different editing options for text than you would an image.
Needless to say I have been cranking out posters left and right. Most of which I print on either my Hewlett Packard PhotoSmart B9180 A3+ printer or my Epson R2400 A3+ printer. FotoFusion Studio can create single or multi-page documents in almost any needed size and resolution so besides scrapbook pages you can design and print something like a wedding album, baby book, etc. FotoFusion supports most popular image formats and way too many features to cover here, I strongly suggest you down the trial and give a test run. I think you will be very pleasantly surprised.
This review covers FotoFusion Studio 3.7 as of this writing a beta of version 4.0 is available for the public to download and try out. It promises more features, improved interface and more options for the automatic collage creation including the ability to order the images by file name, file date, EXIF date, or randomized. Images can be made to fit a grid, or preserve their original aspect ratios even if this leaves gaps between images. We will be covering version 4.0 later after the final version ships.
If you are looking for a fun, creative and innovative program to do photo posters, digital scrapbook pages, portrait packages, photo books and more LumaPix FotoFusion Studio is a great option. There are two lesser versions available for less money. Which version you choose depends on what your needs are.
FotoFusion is loaded with fun and easy to use features that will allow you to layout your photos in nearly any design you want. You can even save your designs as templates so you can just change the photos in them but keep the design, styles and layouts. Very cool software and a must have for anyone with a digital camera and a photo printer.
NOTE: A recent site update for LumaPix has removed all of the information about version 3.x and replaced it with information on version 4.0 even though it is still in beta. The good news is if you buy 3.x now you get the upgrade to version 4.0 for free.
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