Photographs By Me

Something artistic lately, I’ve been playing with diptych and triptych styles. I’ve decided to put together a tutorial as well, using the free software, Inkscape, available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and so on.

What is a diptych? In photography, it’s a photograph composed of two photographs. What’s a triptych? It’s the same, but with three photographs. Think of it as an organized minimalist collage.

Here is a triptych I made:

Can you see the use of the triptych style here? Rather than simply having Jennifer show off this sealed DVD set, there’s a close-up of the title at the upper-right, and a close-up of a character artwork at the lower-right. I have chosen to show this scene from multiple angles so that different aspects are seen at the same time.

I have done the same with the following scene:

In the main photograph (on the left), we see Godzilla has kidnapped little Aryll, and Link is readying an attack to defeat the giant monster with. However, the distance leaves Aryll far away, and the focus leaves Link’s blurred. By using the triptych style, the two kids are able to be shown close-up alongside the main photograph.

Making Your Own -tychs

So, how does one make their own diptych or triptych? I’ll show a diptych tutorial! Triptych is essentially the same, but with one extra step along the way. I’ll show a diptych to keep is simple.

Note that all of these screenshots are being taken on a Linux computer. The interface for Inkscape should be the same for Windows and Mac OS X, but file open dialogs may differ, and non-Inkscape software shown (file manager) will differ.

Download and Install Inkscape

The first place to begin is by downloading and installing Inkscape if you don’t already have it. Don’t worry about cost: it’s free software. Legally free. At the time of the writing, version 0.46 is their latest release, so that’s what I’m using for this tutorial.

Oh, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself! Just what is Inkscape? It’s a vector-based imagine editing program. If you’ve seen Adobe Illustrator CS4 (US$599.00), CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 (US$129.99 to US$355.99), or Xara Xtreme (US$89.00), then you’ll have an idea of what Inkscape (US$0.00) is and can do.

For this tutorial, very little of Inkscape’s features will be used, and they likely can be translated to any of the aforementioned programs with ease.

Luckily, Inkscape needs only be downloaded and installed the first time through the process!

Take Photographs and Process Them

This is actually easier said than done! You should have an idea of what you want your diptyck to be of. Maybe you want to half a photo of a doll and a photo of a flower. Will they be side-by-side, or one over the other? Will the doll photo is wider/taller than the flower photo, or will they be the same size?

Here are my photographs:

My plan is to have the two side-by-side, with the first photograph wider than the second.

At this point, processing can be done in a separate image editor (such as Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Paint.NET, or GIMP). This includes adjusting lighting and shadows, colors, styling photographs in some way, etc. All these things are beyond the scope of this tutorial, as this tutorial focuses on the diptych portion.

If you are editing the images anyways, feel free to rotate them if they are sideways. Otherwise, this step can be done in Inkscape, as will be the case with my photographs.

Import Images into Inkscape

Run Inkscape, then select the “File” menu, sub-menu item “Save As…”. Save the file. This will save a copy of your Inkscape file (currently empty) on your computer. I’ve chosen to save it in the same folder as the photographs, so they’re all in one place.

From “File”, select the submenu “Import”. Navigate to the folder where your photos are stored. You can either import the photos one at a time from here.

Resize and Rotate Photographs

There are two areas circled in red here. The lower one is the page zoom. I like to lower this to 20% at this point so I can see what I’m doing. The upper circle is the corner of the selected photograph(s). The selected photograph(s) can be resized from this anchor point (or any of the other anchors around the image).

Select all photographs from the “Edit” menu, submenu item “Select All”.

To resize the photographs, left-click on an image anchor at a corner of the image. Hold down the left mouse button and the Ctrl key. The Ctrl key ensures the image keeps its proportions when being resized.

Typically, I resize the image to about 1000×750 pixels (for a wide photograph). The height and width can be changed directly from the “W” and “H” text boxes on the second toolbar shown in the screenshot. Clicking on the lock icon will ensure the image is kept in proportion when resized from there.

If necessary, rotate the photographs. When a photograph (or multiple photographs) selected, go to the “Object” menu, then select “Rotate 90° CW” (or “Rotate 90° CCW”, as necessary).

Layout the Diptych

A few things are circled here. We’ll start at the top-left, and work clockwise.

Click on the Square tool on the left toolbar, then draw a rectangle with it. The size and placement don’t matter yet.

Click on the upper toolbar’s paintbrush icon to access fill and stroke options. Click on the “Stroke paint” tab, then on the X mark to disable the stroke.

The next part can be done either from the “Fill” tab, or from the two circled areas at the bottom of the screen. Select a color for the square (something light), and set the opacity to about 70.

You can close the fill/stroke panel by clicking on the small X at the top-right corner of the panel.

Resize the rectangle to a size fitting for the final image to be. Move your phorographs around, and resize them as necessary, to help decide on the size of the rectangle. Once I know about what size I want, I’ll use the “W” and “H” boxes at the top (with the lock unlocked) to set the size to a multiple of ten (personal preference). In this case, I’ve gone with 1000×800 for the rectangle.

I went ahead and zoomed in to 40% to better see what I’m doing. The next step is to draw another rectangle. Since my diptych will be two photos side-by-side, I want to draw a tall, thin rectangle, taller than my layout rectangle. If they diptych will be one photo above another, then the rectangle must be short and wide, wider than the layout rectangle. I like to put ten pixels between my photographs, so I will set the width of this second rectangle to ten pixels.

Position this skinny rectangle exactly where you want there to be whitespace between the two photographs. Feel free to move and resize the images to get a better idea of the layout. If one image is blocking another, click on the image and select the “Object” menu, then “Lower to Bottom” to move it below.

Select both rectangles by holding Shift and clicking on the two of them.

(If you want the split to be directly down the middle, you can use the “Align” panel from the upper toolbar. Set the align panel’s relative to as “Selection”, then click on the “Center on vertical axis” and “Center on horizontal axis” buttons, shown in the screenshot.)

With both rectangles selected, click on the “Path” menu, submenu “Difference”. This will remove the thin rectangle from the big one, essentially cutting the layout rectangle in two pieces. It’s still considered once object by Inkscape, so click on the “Path” menu again, and select the submenu “Break Apart” to split it into two rectangles.

(At this point, I could make this into a triptych layout by making another thin rectangle, then repeating the “Path”, “Difference” and “Path”, “Break Apart” steps.)

Make the Diptych

Do any final resizing and moving of the photographs. Just be sure not to move or resize the layout rectangles! (“Edit” menu, “Undo” submenu is your friend if you accidentally do!) You want the photograph to be bigger than its layout rectangle on all sides. This is important, or the final image will not be layed out properly.

Once you have a photograph positioned under a layout rectangle, and the photograph is selected, hold Shift and click on the layout rectangle over it to select it as well. With the two selected, click on the “Object” menu, “Clip” submenu, and from there the “Set” submenu. This will hide everything in the photograph that’s outside of the layout rectangle.

Repeat this for the second photograph (and the third if working on a triptych).

Add a Border

I can finish with the image right now, but I want to ensure the photograph will have the color white in the ten pixel area between photographs, and I also want to put a ten pixel white border around the diptych.

To begin, I need to know what size my image is. It’ll be the same size as the layout rectangle, but I’ll go ahead and group the pieces to the diptych together, and that will give the size as well.

First, select both parts (“Edit”, “Select All”), then group them together (“Object”, “Group”). This makes them into one single object. Moving one image will now move both. Also, when the diptych is selected, the W and H at the second toolbar at the top list the dimensions. In my case, it’s 1000×800.

Second, draw a new rectangle. (It will still be the same color and opacity as the layout rectangle was before. Don’t worry about this right now.) Since I want to add ten pixels of white border on either side of the top/bottom and left/right of the diptych, and I’ll resize the rectangle to 1020×820. This all uses the same steps as used earlier in this tutorial for drawing and resizing a rectangle.

Third, select both the diptych and the rectangle (“Edit”, “Select All”). We want to align them properly. Click on the “Align” button on the upper toolbar (it’s the button with three horizontal bars). When the align panel opens, set the align panel’s relative to as “Selection”. Click on the “Center on vertical axis” and “Center on horizontal axis” buttons to center the two items together.

At this point, you should see the rectangle completely covering your diptych, and a little larger than it. By the sizes I selected, the two images in my diptych have ten pixels of whitespace between them, and the border rectangle is ten pixels wider than the diptych on all sides.

Unselect the objects (“Edit”, “Deselect”), then click on the rectangle. Using the bottom area of Inkscape, select the color white and set the opacity as 100. This is the same as back when the layout rectangle’s color and opacity were first set.

Move the border rectangle to below the photograph (“Object”, “Lower to Bottom”).

Finally, with the border rectangle still selected, it’s time to export the final diptych! From the “File” menu, select the “Export Bitmap” submenu item. The “Selection” button should be selected, with the Width and Height matching the size of the border rectangle. Input a folder path and filename to save the image to (with a .png extension), then click on the Export button. If you want to convert it from PNG format to JPG format, you’ll need to use another program.

Admire Your Diptych

Sit back and admire your finished work.

It seems like a lot of steps, but after going through them a few times and getting used to the process, you’ll find the process is very quick and easy. You need only know a few tools, how to resize images, and the like. Get used to doing these things, and learn keyboard shortcuts for moving photographs above/below each other (PgUp/PgDown), you’ll find yourself making diptychs faster than you can upload them to show off to the world!