Sometimes we want to use a photo in our layout design over and over again. Maybe it’s because we love the photo and we just can’t help ourselves from choosing it often or maybe the photo is so versatile it just fits so well into different layout designs that it is chosen time and time again. Another reason, one I don’t think I’ll ever relate to, is the fact that you’re a scrapping powerhouse and have actually been able to scrap all your photos, so you have to resort to re-using a previously scrapped photo. There are various reasons why you might want to re-use a photo, so let me suggest some ways to use it, varying the look of the photo.
One of the easiest ways to vary the look of a photo to re-use is to crop it, changing the aspect ratio size and/or zooming in.
Take a look at your photo, to see what is the main focus and what is in the foreground and background. By isolating different areas of your photo, you can change the focal intent, giving the impression of using a different photo entirely. Here is a sample of one photo with five different crops. At first glance it seems as if each is a different photo but they are all copies of the original photo.
Changing the focal point of your photo may be possible i.e. you have a subject against a background , so the intent of the photo may originally have been the subject, by cropping the photo, you may change the intent of the focus as evidenced in the following sample. The focus shifted with the flags, people, sky and the blue car.
By cropping and isolating different areas of a photo, they can be used either separately or together in one layout or multiple layouts. One advantage of using them in multiple layouts, it allows you the opportunity of focusing on different aspects of your photo, maybe telling a different part of the story for each cropped version. When cropping, if you start to lose the quality of your photo, as you are zooming in, try applying a little bit of clarity (adjusts the mid tones contrast, adjust minimally) to your cropped photo or applying a black & white conversion to the photo. Another trick is to attach the cropped photo to a mask that has varying areas of opacity, so that the quality loss of the zoomed in crop isn’t so noticeable. You can also duplicate the cropped photo and apply a blend mode to the duplicate photo layer, which will give a different look to the image.
Be creative, see how many crops you can get out of one image and think of different ways to use them. Hope I’ve inspired you to give it a try!
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