by Susanna

Created on: February 23, 2009

What can you make that is cheap, and fun, and anyone can do?

What about creating a little story comic with photos you have taken? It is fun to do, and anyone can do it as long as you have Photoshop or some other graphic editing software.

To start, you need to follow these steps:

1) Look for some photos you've taken together. It's best if they are good size quality, and in some type of order. If you don't have those photos, you could always go take some photos, have a day out where you just take pictures together.

2) Select the best photos you want in your comic story, make sure you arrange them in order, then put them all in a folder.

3) Open a new white canvass the size of 1140px x 1740px in Photoshop, it looks somewhat like an A4 size page. Zoom it down to 50% or whatever you wish to see the image in better size.

4) This is your choice: Either add one photo on the top and one photo on the bottom, separated by some white space, or have two smaller photos on the top side by side with a large photo on the bottom, or vice versa.

5) Try to think of a colour scheme you want. A happy situation like this, I highly recommend shades of yellow, orange and white.

6) First, use the curve tool on the images to make them brighter. Depending on the colour scheme, you may like to put some special effects. My favourite one is: Open a new layer just above the photo layers, fill the layer with a light yellow colour, set it to 'Overlay' with opacity of 50%, it creates a yellowy effect on the pictures.

7) Now, you can add some speech bubbles. You can either use square or rectangles with a colour, perhaps an orange colour and use the paint brush to add some circles that look like thinking bubbles.

8) Think up some great quotes the person in the photo would say. It can be completely made up. Sometimes, you can ask people for ideas, or say something the person would normally not say. This part is pretty much up t you and what you want.

9) Repeat this with all your photos. You can have different number of photos on each page.

10) Now, it's time to open another canvas on Photoshop, this time making the size 1380px x 1952px, fill the entire page with a shade of yellow perhaps, or another colour you would like.

11) Go to your comic photo page, merge layer and copy that image to the new canvas. You should now get a nice yellow border.

11) When you save all your images, you can zip them or use cutePDF to make them into a PDF for the person you are making this for.

I hope that by the end, you wail have your own little comic book with good memories and laughter.

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