STEP BY STEP VINTAGE CONTACT SHEETS

Fill a film template with your own photos and learn collage skills in Affinity Photo

01 MAKE A BOX

Open the supplied contact_sheet.png file into Affinity, then go to Document>rotate 90 degrees clockwise. Next, we’ll create frames to snap each of our images to. Grab the Rectangle tool from the toolbar and drag a shape over the top left frame.

02 COPY THE RECTANGLES

Get the Move tool, hold Alt and drag the rectangle to make a copy. Position this over the next frame. Keep Alt-dragging to make copies for each of the frames. After, drag the bottom layer to the top of the stack, so the film border is in front of everything else.

03 MAKE A CHILD

With the Move tool, click on the first frame to select the relevant layer. Pull a shot into Affinity. It’ll appear as a layer above the rectangle. Drag the image layer on top of the rectangle, then drag to the right – the shot become a child of the shape layer.

04 FILL THE FRAMES

Now the image layer is confined to the rectangle, we can drag the bounding box to resize it to fit how we want. Highlight the next frame and drag in another shot – repeat. Continue in the same way to fill all the frames, varying the crops as you go.

05 COPY THE NOTE

Highlight the top image layer, then click the Adjustment icon in the Layers panel and pick Black and White – adjust the colours to suit. Next, open contact_sheet_notes. Use the Rectangular Marquee tool to select one of the shapes, then copy and paste it in.

06 BLEND THE NOTE

Use the Move tool to position and resize the note over frames, then click the cog icon to open the blending box. Drag the black point on the Source Layer Ranges down to the bottom to fade out the whites, leaving the red.