Hello, this is Cristi. Today, I'm going to look at creating a contact sheet in Photoshop.
Photoshop has a function that allows you to combine multiple images into one single image,
maybe as a contact sheet to send to someone a sample of all the photos
and talk to them about them, or maybe create a combined thumbnail for a product picture
that you want to upload and sell online, maybe on Etsy or whatever.
So I'm going to exemplify this with some product pictures that I have here. So I have looked at
some, I've created some products for Etsy here, I have some photos of these products. So as you
can see here, I have thumbnails that are separate, I can view them larger maybe,
four images. So I want these to be automatically combined to a single image together, so that I
can upload a single thumbnail image of all these products being sold together.
So I have a kind of three types, I've got five here together that are sold together,
and then I have another one with four again. So how do you combine this without having to load
each of the pictures and creating it manually and copy and pasting them and aligning them yourself?
So that could be very time consuming. So I'm going to show you how you can
achieve this in Photoshop in just a few clicks. So let's go.
In Photoshop, you go to the File menu, and the first thing you need to think about is you need
to have them organized like I do. So all of the images you want together, so if you have many,
many folders with images, you want to put them all together, that you want to end up together in a
contact sheet together. So I say together too many times, but anyway, these are four products here.
I want to combine them together in another folder, there's another set that they need to be together.
So here we go. In Photoshop, go to the File menu and Photoshop has a lot of
functions here but the one you want is go to Automate and select Contact Sheet 2.
So I'm going to click this and let me bring this into view. I've already tested this so
I'm going to go again and choose. So the first thing you need to select is the Source Images.
So you can choose a folder, you can choose files, you can add the files yourself by
browsing here and adding them yourself. But if they are already in the folder, you go to
Folder. So you click choose here, and you browse to your folder and, notice I'm not going inside of
each folder individually, because I want this whole thing to be done for me automatically.
I don't want to have to select these folders, so I'm selecting the folder above that, which
means this is, this is the folder here called Scrunchies. So I'm selecting this folder and
Photoshop is going to find all three here, so I'm going to show you another option there that you
need to tick. Don't select any of these, so just stay in the Scrunchies and then select folder.
So now the scrunchies is there, this is the folder. And then you need to tick the box
to include sub folders, because we just said, we want Photoshop to look in the sub folders.
Then you want to group images by folder, so then you want to take this box also
so that the images in the sub folder will create a new contact sheet for each set.
Okay. If you have more images than fit on one contact sheet in the same folder,
then Photoshop is actually going to create a second contact sheet with
the remaining images, as we will see in a minute.
So we have selected the folder,
we have told it to include the sub folders and to group images by folder.
Now on to the next section, the document, the resulting document with your images in it.
So this applies to all of the resulting contact sheets. If you have more folders,
each one is going to create a document like this. So here you need to specify the size
of the final image that's going to be your contact sheet. One contact sheet, anyway. So
I have specified here 2000 by 2000 pixels, this is the recommended image size on Etsy,
for example. If you're selling products and you're combining images like this. And then
you can specify the resolution here on in DPI, this is kind of a large for Etsy, if you want,
maybe you need to put 72 here because this is like a screen resolution image we want. Okay.
Don't worry about this color profile, this is going to be just you know,
RGB. So then you want to flatten all layer. If you think you're going to want to make
any changes to the contact sheet before saving, you can take this off and then Photoshop is not
going to make all the layers flat. It's going to include the images in your contact sheet,
but allow you to go and take them out, some of them resized them, move them around,
swap them, do whatever you want before saving. So it's not going to make the image flat. Okay.
I'm actually going to tick the box to make them all flat,
because I don't want to make any changes.
And then you have a third section here that you want to specify, how are the thumbnails going
to be placed. So you can change the option here to put them across first or down first,
so Photoshop is going to take the images from the folder in order of file name. And
it's going to take them across first, put them across first or down first.
And then the next thing you see, it's how many columns do you want and how many rows? So in
my case here, you may have seen that some of the thumbnails have four pictures in them,
some of the folders four pictures, and one of them has five. So I want to have two by two,
with the exception of the one that has five, this is going to create two contact sheets.
I just want two by two, so my resulting images are going to have two pictures by two pictures.
So let's see what happens now. So I have selected this, you can rotate them for best fit,
obviously if you want, if your images are different aspect ratios you want
to let Photoshop determine which is the orientation that fit best.
But of course, if you have product images and stuff like that,
you don't want to have Photoshop rotate them automatically, so I'm not gonna tick this box.
And finally, one option you may not I care about is to use the file name as
a caption. So if you take this box here, you can choose the font and the format,
the you know, bold, italic, whatever for that font and the font size to show as a
caption next to each picture. If you're creating a contact sheet and you want to
send it to someone and you want them to be able to refer to the pictures by file name,
you can tick this box and Photoshop is going to put the file name next to the image.
In this case, we're just creating a product thumbnail,
we don't care about the file names, so let's see what happens now. I'm going to click OK.
And as you can see, Photoshop is adding layers here on the right for every file and the files
are being created and added across the top. You see the tabs here and you can see them being
flattened now. And look, look at this, this is my contact sheet for the first one or the fourth one.
Anyway, let's go to the first one here. So we have four images here. They have some spacing
around and you can see that the background is not uniforms, so sorry, it's not the same color,
so you can tell where each picture ends, and so this may not be what you want for your product.
So I'm going to show you how you can actually probably deal with that later in another tutorial,
by selecting these products and taking them out and then placing them without the background.
So we're not doing this now, so these are the resulting contact sheets. Now,
remember I had three folders and I have four contact sheets because I
selected two by two and one folder has five images, so now this has created four here,
and then it automatically created a new contact sheet with just one picture.
If you don't want that, then you need to make sure that the pictures in the
folders are exactly the number you want. Okay. And here's the last one.
This has been a very simple tutorial to create a contact sheet. In this case,
I'm using this to create thumbnails for products to be sold on Etsy together,
so I'm combining these images. So if you have a lot of products, this is very useful and very
time-saving. Thank you for watching, I hope you enjoy my tutorials. If you liked them and find
them useful, please subscribe to my channel and share it with your friends and see you next time.