Dictionary Print Photoshop Tutorial

As promised, I'm going to show you how to make cool-looking overprinted dictionary (or other text) pages in Photoshop. This eliminates the need to try to feed dictionary pages into your finicky printer. Plus, it means you can use your favorite pages over and over.

You can see some of my own prints in various stores and online (art.com has a good selection). At first, I was hesitant to do the tutorial, even though a lot of people who know Photoshop probably already know how to do it. I wondered if it would hurt retail sales of my own prints, for example. But finally, I concluded that the DIY audience and the print-buying audience are probably two distinct groups. And of course, there's the fact that the print-buying audience is paying for my work, not for a tutorial. So here we go:

Step 1. Find a photo you want to use, and convert it to black and white. I highly suggest that you do something high contrast, with some white space to avoid a muddy final product. Now is not the time to get all Ansel Adams about things. Go ahead and blow out the highlights and destroy those details in the shadows. It's OK.

Step 2. Find a page of text that you want to use. When I first did these for my home with a printer and actual pages, I used pages from an old dictionary. Then, I dug up some art magazines (circa 1899) I bought years ago at a Paris flea market and started using those.

Once you have chosen your page, scan it at a fairly high resolution. Because I make 27x27" prints, my files end up being huge. If your page is roughly the same size as the print you want to make, you can scan it at 300dpi. If it's smaller, go higher.

Step 3. Open both digital files in Photoshop. You might want to crop your photo to the size you want before you add the text. Then, you are going copy and paste one of your files onto the other. I usually copy the page (select all and then copy) and then paste it over my photo. It will appear as a new layer that completely covers your photo.

 If your file is too large (like mine was), then you can use the transform tool (command-T for Mac users), find a corner (see those lines in the gray area? that's where the little boxes are), hold shift (to make sure you don't skew the perspective) and drag until you get a size that works. Then hit return to apply the transformation.

Step 4. Last step. Already. Make sure that your top layer is active. Now, look in your layers palette and change the blend mode (see where it says "Normal"?) to "multiply."

And magically, you can now see your black and white photo as if it were printed on top of the page.

And that, my friends, is one of the fastest tutorials ever.

UPDATE: And of course, if you want to buy some of the ones I've done in virtually any size print, you can get them at my site for very reasonable prices.

An Art Print and Licensing Story

A few posts ago I mentioned the dilemma of how much commercial stuff to share. But then I also said that my impulse tends toward disclosure, so I'm going to give you a true story of a commercial endeavor and in my next post, a tutorial.

And now, the true story of the commercial endeavor.

Remember this post?

Source: takeoutphoto.blogspot.com via Marc on Pinterest

No? Well, it's been repinned a billion times on Pinterest. The summer of 2011 my wife and I bought an old window frame and I knew that I wanted to use it for photos. It just so happened that a massive old dictionary I have had pages that fit nicely. I printed some black and white Paris photos directly onto select pages, tacked them onto the wall with old upholstery pins, and hung the window frame on top. I posted a tutorial on it, which subsequently got pinned an re-pinned on Pinterest.

From my wall to the mass market
Obviously, I liked them enough to put them in my own house, so I decided I might as well try out their commercial appeal. I am under exclusive contract with Wild Apple Graphics for all things mass-market, so I sent a link of the blog post to the art director along with some sample images. And I figured it couldn't hurt to mention that it was "trending on Pinterest."

The submissions process is somewhat mysterious. From my end, it goes like this: I make some art, I send it (usually via email), they get back to me (mostly) and tell me if they think it fits their needs (I'm sure they know the market better than I do. It is their job, after all.) Next, I prep the files in the appropriate size (often, this has been either 27x27 inch for the square ones and 16x20 for portrait) and then upload them via ftp.

On their end...who knows? Do they print them out and throw them in the air and read them like tea leaves? Do they meet in a boardroom and decide what they like? Does the owner's pet llama have any influence? I couldn't tell you. I know that they work (selling wholesale) with hundreds of clients and go to various trade shows. I know that they run things by some clients to test the waters. Some of the photos they have me upload are never seen again (such as some book prints that I love), and others make it into the catalog. More on that mystery in the future...

A file I once submitted that apparently failed to impress. Source: takeoutphoto.blogspot.com via Marc on Pinterest

Finally, after a few months, a royalty check arrives with an itemized statement that shows me how many of which prints have sold (but it doesn't say which companies have purchased them, for whatever reason). Art licensing royalty rates are not high, but I have no complaints because I realize how many people (and possibly, llamas) are involved in the marketing, printing, and distribution of my photos. In January, for example, about 11,000 of my prints sold. If I thought there were any way I could sell that many prints by myself, I probably would, but that is hard to pull off as one person. Even when my ABC Paris photos were featured on Design*Sponge (which, incidentally, is what got me the contract in the first place), the sales from all of that publicity were relatively modest.

A Paris dog print that has done well.

Source: fulcrumgallery.com via Marc on Pinterest

From printer to digital files
Back to the dictionary print story...I shipped a bunch of actual prints on dictionary paper (and others on paper from old art magazines (circa 1899) that I bought at a Paris flea market years ago. The printing was a nightmare. The printer heads often hit against the edges of the old paper (the dreaded "head strike" that made the manager of the print lab cringe) and I lost of few of my favorite pages to misfeeds, margin errors, etc. One day, I sent my assistant to run off some prints and half of them came back upside-down (not his fault). The ones that worked were shipped off to Wild Apple, where the best of those were digitized. I don't have the files on hand, but you can see an example here.

Source: art.com via Marc on Pinterest

That was the hard way. Once I started to prepare new files, I did it digitally, as in the "Paris" typographic photo above. This was so much easier to do. If you are pretty good with Photoshop, you can easily figure out how I did it. If you're wondering how to save yourself from the headache of misfeeds and other printing nightmares, stay tuned. In my next post, I'll show you how it's done.

If you want to see more, you can check out some of my prints at art.com.

DIY: Print photos on old dictionary pages

I first saw this idea floating around the Pinterest boards. People had printed photos onto old dictionary pages. I just happen to have a HUGE unabridged dictionary from 1937:

 I love the marbled exterior and the tabs. But since I don't actually USE the dictionary other than for decor, I thought it could stand to sacrifice a few pages for an art project.

MAKING THE PRINTS

There's really not much to it:
1. Carefully rip out a page and measure it.
2. Choose a photo (or in my case, 6)
3. Convert the photo to black and white. It's best to use photos with some contrast and a decent amount of white space. Whatever is white will not actually print white on your page; it will just show through to the background.
4. The first tricky part is to figure out the margins so your photo will print on the right part of the page. Not that it's necessary to be exact with this kind of thing. I measured the size I wanted, made a blank document in Photoshop at that size, opened my photo, copied and pasted it into my blank document, and then used the Free Transform tool to make it the size I needed with the margins I needed. The best thing to do is approach it with a very forgiving attitude. Apply the "galloping horse" rule (which is that if you don't notice the error when galloping by on a horse then it's fine).
5. The second tricky part is feeding your paper into the printer. If your paper is old like mine was, you'll have to carefully hand feed it.

Once I knew it was going to work, I used the first page of the dictionary for this photo I took of an iron gate in Paris:

One feature of this particular dictionary that I really like is the letters down the right side.

Another cool thing that you can see on this crop of a bike photo is the dictionary illustrations that show through, like these wasps. I used all Paris photos, which makes me wish I had an equally cool French dictionary to cannibalize. (The photos I snapped of these completed pages, by the way, had the awful lighting conditions of incandescent+sunlight, which is why the color doesn't always look uniform.)

 

The door knocker looks really cool, in my opinion, because of the contrast and the ample white space.

DISPLAYING THE PRINTS

I bought an old six-pane wooden window for $10 at a consignment store. I knew I was going to use it for photos, and it turns out that the panes are just about the right size for the dictionary pages. My plan was to simply tack the pages on the wall with decorative upholstery tacks and then hang the window on top of it. The trick is figuring out where to pin each photo. I hate doing anything that requires measuring and calculation, so I hung up the window, marked with pencil just outside of each pane, took the frame down, and then put painters tape to show where the divisions were:

(Did I mention how sick I am of that wall color? It's changing very very soon.)

I had to take the window on and off a few times and adjust the tape until it lined up pretty well:

Finally, I just started tacking on the pages, making sure that they were at least in line with each other (I didn't care if they were perfectly centered in each frame--galloping horse, remember?).

I used a variety of upholstery tacks that had been sitting in a drawer in the basement just waiting for something like this. Here is what it looked like before I put the window back up:

The detail of a chair (top left) seems to be a favorite. Top middle is my favorite, but I like them all. In fact, I have about 20 photos that are good candidates for this sort of project.

Finally, I hung the window back up:

OTHER OPTIONS
You can save yourself time by just framing the thing. Or better still, don't even frame it; just use decorative pins, tacks, or whatever. You could also save yourself the printing effort by scanning the dictionary page and making a composite, but I really wanted to print on the actual pages.

Maybe this will inspire you for your own project. If you do something and post it, send me a link.

BONUS!
Don't want to make your printer hate you by feeding it old dictionary pages? OK. Check out the tutorial I just posted on how to do the whole thing in Photoshop.

AND...You can also buy my exclusive versions of the prints you see here with all of the flexibility (almost any size) and durability of photo paper (or giclée, canvas, even metal) you can get them on my site.