Presenting Images

There are many ways to present images and I feel that the presentation method depends on who it is for and  what it is for i.e. college assignment, photographic club.


If like I am doing now it is for a college assignment then something like photobooks, printed on photographic paper and mounted and/or framed.


I know from my photographic club experience of competitions and and exhibitions, photographs are mounted with mount board.   For exhibitions, they can additionally be framed in mirror plated frames.  In my experience the cost of mount board ranges from £1 to £2 for xxx size to xxx size.   Colour is a factor when mounting photographs.   Photographs can be simply placed on mount board or you can cut a frame out so that there is an angle to the frame.  I now have instructions on how to do this to obtain good results as opposed to my initial attempts which had angles going the wrong way and cut lines too long.


For personal use, there are now so many ways to present photographs in every day objects including: mouse mats, bags, roller blinds, coasters, calendars, clothing, books.... the list is endless.  There are also many many companies offering the above services, at a range of prices.  


To print at College an A3 sheet costs £3.50 onto photographic paper.
To print A3 at PHOTOBOX.CO.UK (http://www.photobox.co.uk/shop/prints/) it costs £7.49 plus postage
To print A3 at DSCOLOUR LABS.CO.UK (http://www.dscolourlabs.co.uk/online_photo_printing.cfm) it is £1.10 plus postage 


For my presentation, I uploaded one of my prints to DSCOLOUR LABS.  For an A4 print on matt paper I paid 65p plus postage.   I am happy with the quality and the service.   The only drawback with this website is that you can't save your upload for example if you get interrupted and need to take a break you can't go back to it later so you either have to start again or finish the job and then start again but you pay two lots of postage that way.   There probably is a way around it but I didn't find it.


As I have run out of time to send the rest of the prints off to DSCOLOUR LABS I have created an A3 sheet in photoshop and then put the images onto it so I have all 6 final prints together as shown below.   I am struggling though to put text labels on.  On the Harvey picture it is no problem however on the other 5 images the text label goes behind the image so it can't be seen.  Experience tells me that there is somewhere in Photoshop a switch that you can apply to put the label on top of the photograph.  I just need help finding it !!   To place the images, I switched on the grid so I could see exactly where each photograph was being placed so I could line them up and also ensure they are the same size.   Since writing the above, I have now completely redone the A3 sheet.  I have not put labels on as was advised they didn't look good.   To obtain the document below, I created a new PSD document size of 20 x 20 cm.  I then dragged the first photograph onto that document, flattened it and then dragged it onto my A3 sheet.  By dragging each photograph onto the 20 x 20 document this would keep them all the same size.  However, the photograph of Melissa would not fit on 20 x 20 so I created a 20 x 30 and followed the same procedure.   I then did the same for the landscape documents.  Once they were all on the A3 sheet I moved them around and put them at angles until I got the final presented image shown below.