Suppose you're a photographer who works in Photoshop and Lightroom, and who wants to create a borderless "contact sheet", a grid of different photos with pixel-perfect alignment of the edges of each image.
Perhaps the obvious way, using Photoshop, is to import each image into a layer, resize each to create tile-sized images, then manually move them into place. This can take considerable time for a grid of just 10 images because:
- Re-sizing tiles involves calculating optimum dimension to properly fill a given space, then applying a scale transform manually to each layer. If you decide to change e.g. the number of images in a row, you have to start from scratch
- Moving images to the right place may not be a simple case of dragging them, because source images may be of slightly different aspect ratios, or require slightly different crops. Using layer order can overcome this, but again time consuming.
- Every time you need to test swapping photo locations and layouts, you have to start over.
Other issues:
- There's no easy way to "zoom" or crop images within a tile space as you go along.
- You can't change your mind about the output file dimensions, etc.
Lightroom offers a solution to some of the above with its print module but the pixel-perfect alignment of images is very iffy, as you can't zoom in to larger grid sizes to check there were no gaps, or to check to see which image was on top of which other image.
Other e.g. iOS apps do this function well, but only offer grids of up to, say, 4x4. Perhaps I need 3x20.
Can someone suggest an alternative method, alternative software (pref. Windows), or a clever way to do what I need to do in Photoshop?